This past summer was the first time I did not do math with my children for three months. I have always homeschooled three months on, one month off, to have three huge breaks during the year, with no break being so long that the kids were bored half out of their minds. Well, this summer I had a lot to do for my business, so I decided to take a real summer break. Of course, we ended up doing tons of homeschooling anyways by accident because we can’t help learning all the time. But we did no math whatsoever.
After three weeks of school, I realize that it’s a complete farce that kids lose their math over the summer. Sure, if the kids never learned their multiplication tables for real, they might not remember them. But they never really learned them in the first place. Timed drills can help your child to really learn their math facts until they are second nature. Anyway, math programs assume that you’ve taken the summer off, and they make the first few weeks easy-peasy on purpose to review what was done the previous year.
Just look back on your own childhood memories. Didn’t some of your best childhood memories take place on the long and lazy summer days? Weren’t you all refreshed to start the new school year in September because you were happy to get into the swing of things after so long a break? Should I never give my children the gift of a real summer holiday, where they can play and run and fill their days with their own ideas of what they would like to pursue?
It was my children’s first summer break ever this year, and I’m glad we did it. They didn’t lose their math. They’re getting A’s. “Mom, this math is so easy,” they say. So now I know that losing math over the summer is a complete myth, and I now have the freedom to take a summer break if that’s what we want to do. Hurray for summer!
Tags: Homeschooling, math, summer
I think that forgetting math over the summer totally depends on the child and their learning style and abilities.Our son we could take all summer off from math and he never skipped a beat. While our daughter, if we did that we had to re-learn basic concepts all over in the fall. We went onto having her do math year round and otherwise took summers off and was a lot stress for both of us.
I think if the kids overlearn their math, they are less likely to forget it over the summer.