Summer Slide and What to Do About It

You all know what summer slide is, right? It’s a cute name for something a lot of teachers find horrific: the academic decline needlessly suffered by children over the summer months. If only these sweet babes would stay in the classroom where they belong, this wouldn’t be happening!

Ahem.

Allow me to weave for you an alternate narrative.

So what if the 36 weeks of the school year are enough? What if children have other business to do, and they were actually allowed to do it? What if summers are for other things — for play, recreation, bonding with family, and more?

My thought is that we need to be really, really careful about intruding about a child’s free time.

This loss of reading and math skills isn’t actually permanent. The cultural assumption is that while they are engaging in seemingly nonacademic play, they aren’t learning, and that is the assumption I want to dispute.

When my children were babies, I remember noticing a fascinating thing: when they were learning one new skill, they would often drop another one. So, for example, when my third child — who had been a chatter box from the time she was well under a year old — started learning to run, she decided she didn’t have much to say. When she was into puzzles, she stopped practicing her running. And so on and so forth.

My point is that there is an extent to which this is a completely natural progression of learning.

The children shift their focus from one thing to another. In our lesson times, we keep them diligent, yes. We make them come back to it day after day, long after they would have switched gears. But this doesn’t mean we need to invade their personal time with our own ideas about how things need to happen.

I am reminded of a story James Taylor tells about a Thomas Shields in his wonderful book Poetic Knowledge. Thomas Shields was a self-proclaimed “dullard.” He couldn’t understand math. It didn’t connect in his brain — that is, until he performed thousands of hours of farm labor. It was in his work with, for instance, the pitchfork {which works upon the principle of the lever} that he came to understand it, for he was forced to embody the principles of math and physics in order to work well at his duties. He counted bags of wheat and knew by feel and look how much they weighed, how many bushels they were.

It would have been easy to watch Thomas Shields using his pitchfork over and over and think it had nothing to do with his academic or mental development. And yet, it was the physicality that allowed the ideas of math and physics to finally seep into his soul.

When little children are playing with water or sand or balls or sticks, we adults have no idea what connections are being made in their brains. It is important to remember that reading readiness has to do with the BODY. I don’t think we can emphasize the connection between mind and body enough, for it is this connection which makes play so important.

So what is my solution to summer slide?

Well, I do have my older children do a bit of math. They read on their own now, so I have no requirements in that regard, but there was a time when we set aside a time for reading during the hottest part of the day.

We read aloud a lot.

I have always left the Bob Books that we’ve already done out in a box for easy access — so that someone who really wants to can easily practice their skills.

But mostly, I let them play.

And I highly recommend this, especially if your child is under eight. Let him play. You can play catch up in the fall if need be. It’s really not that big a deal. Let summer be summer.