Did you know that today is National Summer Learning Day? (We didn’t either, and thanks to Bill Lewis for bringing this to GCP’s attention.) With over 6 weeks to go until the end of August, there is still plenty of time to encourage your son or daughter to focus on sharpening his or her skills during the summer. No point in letting brain cobwebs form during the summer which can slow them down when school starts.

Go to the The National Summer Learning Association’s webpage, found at summerlearning.org, for a great list of digital summer learning adventures for your children, including the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge and the MetaMetrics Summer Math Challenge. Why don’t you do a challenge with your son or daughter? Pick a book from the Scholastic list and have each of you read it independently. Then talk about what you’ve read. Not only will it be a fun activity to share, you will get a good idea of your child’s reading comprehension level, and you may get a sense of what he or she may need to work on in the coming year. Be sure to keep it light and fun, and don’t critique the speed of his reading or her commentary on the book. The goal is to encourage reading and spend time together.

Also be sure to check out bealearninghero.org for great tips on setting your children up for success in the new school year. Their Summer Stride program —designed to combat Summer Slide—offers free and easy to use resources and learning tools to help children “stride forward”. You should also take a look at the GCP articles on beating summer slide found here, here and here for more ideas.

Celebrate National Summer Learning Day by making a plan for summer learning!