School in the summer?

Summertime is a great opportunity to do a little bit of school work with your elementary student that will pay off big dividends in the year ahead.  Most of the upper elementary kids I work with have some deficits in math, so this is my favorite place to start.

There are many many reasons for these knowledge gaps, they are almost to be expected in our modern public school system.  The first and most obvious reason is that schools were closed for a year or more and we are all hearing more and more about how ineffective virtual school was, especially for younger students.  Teachers were blindsided by covid just as much as the rest of the world and didn’t have research based, practiced methods of providing quality content online.  Younger kids have shorter attention spans and are used to a much more engaging experience in school.

The other, more interesting, main reason is the push toward no homework for elementary school.  It sounds like a nice thing to have no homework, and it is, but a big big side effect is that parents and other caregivers have no way to help their child get a leg up in school.  Many parents I work with have no real idea what is going on in the classroom and that is exacerbated by the fact that teachers communicate with parents in teacher language, referring to state standards with educational jargon.  It takes more than a quick skim of a weekly email to understand what they’re working on this week.

As students move up into fourth and fifth grade they should have all of their math facts down cold, and very few do.  They learn long division in fourth grade (at least here in Texas), and an already difficult concept is made infinitely frustrating if they don’t know math facts.  Long division uses all 4 basic math skills and if those are hard or even impossible you can imagine how things will go.  Add to that complication the fact that most adults don’t ever use long division; even if they try to sit down and practice with their child they might be clumsy and not confident.  The solution is to walk it back to before long division.  This is where summer is super useful.

All elementary kids can benefit tremendously from knowing basic math facts in all four operations, at least to 12.  I recommend a quick five minutes a day (five days a week) of parent involved drilling.  This isn’t fun or interesting and I know both parent and child would very much rather not.  Set a timer and pick a reward for both of you for afterward!  (Coffee, popsicle, dance party, social media check, whatever is quick and easy and can give you a shot of dopamine). There aren’t a lot of ways to make math facts more fun, so you can just do flashcards, pick an app to practice with, print out time tests, fill in the blanks on multiplication tables, have parent vs child races or contests.  Anything slightly game like helps a lot.

I 100% promise you that spending this 5 minutes a day with your child (and always focus on being emotionally neutral or positive during practice time.  This isn’t the moment to correct behavior.  We’re trying to learn math and if your child doesn’t want to he will try and distract you with behavior to get out of the math.  Don’t fall for it.) will make an enormous difference in school next year, and by extension, middle school math, high school math, SAT scores, college apps.  It’s worth it!  It’s annoying, but super doable, easy to implement, and tremendously effective.  You can do it!