(image has absolutely nothing to do with the article. It’s our wedding anniversary today, and this was my present from my husband…)

Summer holidays are great, aren’t they? I used to crave them all year long when I was teaching full-time and, although they take on a slightly different tone with 2 small (-ish) children to entertain, they are still a very welcome release after weeks of work, homework, endless nagging, managing everyone’s social schedules and the feeling that you’re running very hard just to stay in the same place.

However, 6 weeks is a long time in the life of a primary school child and it often seems like feast or famine where learning is concerned: they work very hard from September to June, then grind to a sudden halt for the duration of the summer holidays.

Now, I am definitely not an advocate of summer schools for children. I am not even very keen on private tuition over the holidays. I do believe that play and exercise and being outdoors and developing socially are just as important as more formal learning. Beating the ‘summer slump’ doesn’t need to involve sitting down at a desk, pencil in hand, nor do you need to spend any money or a great deal of time. The best way to ensure the hard work that your child and their teacher has put in over the year isn’t lost over the summer is to make learning an integral part of what you do as a family. So with that in mind, here are 5 ways to beat the summer slump:

1) Go shopping. (Go on, it’s for the good of the children, honest…!) Talk to your child about how much items cost. Ask them simple questions, depending upon their age, for example, ‘Which of these items costs more?’ (for a younger child) or ‘If I buy this item, how much change will I get from £5?’ So much of what we buy these days is paid for using cards, but try to ensure that children are given cash to use as much as possible, so that younger ones become familiar with the coins and see the ‘real-word’ uses of mathematics.

2) Talk about time. The school day is governed by time, with break, lunch and home time at set intervals, so much so that children often become lazy about reading time for themselves. One question I’m often asked at school is, ‘How long is it until break/lunchtime?’ Children have a natural curiosity about time which can be exploited: my daughter is fond of asking how many days it is until her birthday, so we have made charts together where she can tick off the days and this can lead to a chat about how many days there are in a week, weeks in a month, etc… The same idea can be used for your summer holiday: draw tick charts to count off the days, talk about different time zones if you go abroad, or just very simply ask your children to tell you the time on an analogue clock. Talk aloud about what time you are doing various activities together and how long it is until then.

3) Have a whiteboard in the kitchen/shared family space. This may be a board that you use for shopping lists, or family notices or doodling. Ours sits on our wall in our kitchen and has been an invaluable learning tool. Use it for family games of ‘hangman’ to help with spellings, draw word searches on it, write sentences with missing words to help with vocabulary development, put the occasional maths problem on it to solve together as a family. Make sure that your children see Mum and Dad learning too: get them to challenge you in this shared space.

4) Use the summer holiday time to explore books. Often, during term-time, children get stuck just reading their school book, as there’s often precious little time for anything else. If these are uninspiring (Biff, Chip, Floppy and the flippin’ magic key, anyone…?!), then it is very easy to see how they can be turned off reading at a young age. Children often say that they dislike reading when really they just haven’t found the right books yet. Use the summer holidays to explore what their interests. As a teacher, I have never been too fussed about WHAT children are reading. If they like comics, let them read comics, if they like Minecraft, let them read gaming books and magazines. Expanding their range can come later, for now, just get them reading. Use your local library and make sure that you talk to your children about what they are reading: ask them to explain the story to you, describe their favourite character, or how to get an exploding arrow (Minecraft, and we haven’t managed it yet…)

5) Do some science. Get out and explore nature. Look for bugs in their natural habitat – ladybirds always seem to be favourite here. Keep a tally chart to see how many you find. Make some observations about where they like to live. Predict what sort of creatures you’ll see on sunny days versus rainy days and test your hypothesis. Use lemons to make invisible ink, look at shadows and sunlight at different times of the day. Check out http://www.scienceboffins.co.uk, which has some great experiments.