From "Summer Slide" to "Learning Stride"

How Families Can Optimize Summer Opportunities for Continued Learning & Growth

Steps 2 Success Educational Solutions are experts in education, personalized online and in-person tutoring, curriculum development, and educational advocacy. Call or text 910-406-8884 to take your next step to success!

Coach Meredith is the Wilmington Program Director of Steps 2 Success Solutions. She is passionate about the growth & abilities of students as they learn in & out of the classroom, and she believes that parents should feel supported by the community as they navigate the challenges of raising capable, confident children in the 21st century.

Understanding Summer Learning Loss

The summer season can be a well-deserved break from school, and families have different traditions and ways of enjoying the longer days and warmer weather. A common concern, though, that can plague even the most positive parents during summer vacation is whether their child will experience summer learning loss.

Researchers have long attributed summer vacation to stalled or regressed student academic achievement. In particular, early elementary students who lose access to educational resources over an extended break (like summer vacation) can display noticeable losses in foundational learning skills - like phonics, reading, and math - when they return to school months later. Middle and high school students who take too much of a “brain break” during the summer months might also return to school in the fall with stunted skills in areas of math, critical thinking, and writing.

Especially with academic challenges and social shifts post-Covid, summer is now a prime time for students to supplement their school year learning with purposeful experiences and targeted learning goals. But this doesn’t have to mean that your vacation looks like summer school - and in fact, it’s probably best if it doesn’t!

Summer can be a time to supplement learning that children might not get inside of the classroom. Photo from Wix Images.

Making the Most of Summer

Summertime comes with new opportunities and special experiences for families and children: unique trips, treasured camps, and time to relax & soak up the sun. And these are fantastic chances for kids to grow their social skills and life skills that they might not get a chance to develop every day in the classroom.

Productive conversations with your kids might center around a variety of social skills: helping a peer, acting as a strong leader or a good listener, practicing a challenging skill, or making a new friend. And before recognizing these situations in their own worlds, kids could benefit from modeling or role-playing these situations with you! These opportunities to practice empathy, self-awareness, leadership, collaboration, and teamwork are superb chances for growth in any kind of setting, even if these categories wouldn’t show up on a report card or standardized test.

That's not to say that academic endeavors should completely come to a halt - after all, that's where the dreaded “summer slide” of math, reading, writing, and thinking skills is thought to come in. But before sitting your kid down with repetitive worksheets or online tutorials, consider how you could work to integrate these skills into your family’s summer routine.

“Helping” Promotes Engagement, Interest, & Learning

Perhaps your child could help with organizing a grocery trip: surveying the pantry, working with a budget, and comparing ingredient labels to decide what will work for your family’s upcoming meals. A quick conversation or lesson about how proteins, carbohydrates, and sugars all work inside our bodies could be the foundation to healthier decisions in the future for your child and your family - a lasting life lesson without the need for a workbook or a drawn-out reading assignment.

There's also a chance for your kids to do some research and reading about different excursions or activities for that upcoming family trip! Children can learn about new places, practice reading a map and following directions, and apply effective time management skills within this one challenge, helping you put together an itinerary - maybe for one day, a weekend, or an entire trip, depending on the child’s ability and interest level.

Summer experiences can form lasting impacts on developing brains. How can your child get involved? Photo from Wix Images.

Opportunities for children to combine personal interests, social skills, and earning money are ripe in the summertime - lemonade stand, anyone? For younger children, a quick review on counting money, reading recipe directions, and telling time can reinforce mathematical knowledge in a very practical, hands-on manner. Aside from the lemonade stand, playing hopscotch and jump rope can reinforce mathematical knowledge, patterns, and rhythm (physical movement is great for retaining knowledge and linking neuroactivity!). Older children might benefit from learning about different seasonal needs for the garden, trying new athletic challenges, and investing money from summer jobs. Leave us a comment about a summer learning opportunity that your family has enjoyed!

If any of this sounds like a crazy addition to your to-do list, fear not! Steps 2 Success Solutions, a tutoring and educational advocacy group, has outlined a Summer Life Skills package for 2025 that takes all of these principles and puts them into action. Inquire today to see how your children can get involved and what we can add to their summer.

But What About Summer Assignments?

We get it. As children reach those higher grade levels, the summer assignments seem to pile up each year. Teachers and administrators are really trying to make sure that kids don't lose those precious academic skills, coming back to the classroom without confidence or grade-level capabilities. While this probably isn't the highlight of your family's summer, it's still a great way for your child to practice time management and work on building good habits.

A simple routine, like reading for 20-30 minutes each day (or every other day) soon becomes part of the norm. Bonus points if you can get your family excited about a reading challenge, like at your local library! Or picking two days a week to address reading & writing assignments and two days for math & science assignments will give your child a tangible goal within visible schedule, along with a few days to fill in with a different preferred activity. 

Academic skills, like reading, can be refined every day in small, positive ways - throughout all four seasons! Photo from Wix Images.

And if your child just needs some extra one-on-one support to make sure he or she really understands the work (and really gets it done), Steps 2 Success is here for that, too. Check out our academic tutoring, study skills, and summer prep packages. Our tutors work to engage all of our students in a meaningful, supportive manner. We know that the path to success looks different for everyone, and we are here to partner with you on that journey.

An Enjoyable Summer for Everyone

This summer, let’s spend more time at the jungle gym and water park - where you and your kids can enjoy the rides without worrying about the summer learning slide. Steps 2 Success can work with your family’s schedule with in-person or online tutoring to provide enjoyable, supportive learning opportunities for all students, while still allowing you all to enjoy the summer vacation.

Resources We Reviewed:

“Camp Was Made For Summer Learning” by Tom Holland. June 19, 2015.

“Combating the Summer Slide” by Katelyn Fletcher & others. Sept. 27, 2023.

“Is Summer Learning Loss Real?” by Paul T. von Hippel. Fall 2019.

“Rethinking the Summer Slide” by Megan Kuhfeld. June 6, 2019.

“What We Know About Summer Learning Loss” in Psychology Today. July 6, 2020.

All article images are from Wix Media/Images.