Go From Summer Slide to Summer Surge

Summer in the Palisades is fantastic. It is the time of the Fourth of July 5/10K and fireworks. It is family time at the beach, summer camp, barbeques and pool parties with good friends and families.

For many kids in the Palisades, and the rest of the country, summer is also the time of the “Summer Slide.” This is the phenomenon named by educators because students’ mental and academic abilities slide back, or diminish, over the 10 weeks or so of summer vacation.

Taking a few months off from daily schoolwork is a welcome and useful mental break. Just as any top athlete finds it beneficial to rest their bodies during the off-season, having time away from the daily school routine is healthy and productive.

However, most kids go too far in their time off and don’t do brain exercise. But with just a few hours each week of work that, if done right, students will actually start to enjoy, the Summer Slide can be replaced by the Summer Surge. And as we head in to the final weeks of summer this is the perfect time to get the brain working again.

So what should your kids do over the summer to turn their Summer Slide into a Surge? How do you enable them to develop their cores skills without taking away from their prized relaxation?

Focus on the single most important foundational subject for all students in K-12: reading comprehension.

The Importance and Challenge of Reading Comprehension

Somewhere in elementary school students stop learning to read and start reading to learn. The problem with this is that most people’s reading comprehension skills for challenging material are often much weaker than they should be.

Haven’t we all had the experience of reading a full page of text only to look up with a puzzled expression on our face and think, “What the heck did I just read?”

This is because our brains can focus on more than one thing at once, and often the reading material for school isn’t as interesting as the other things going on around us or in our own head, so our brains focus instead on those more interesting things rather than the reading.

A technique we have found incredibly useful with students from elementary school to those studying for graduate school admissions exams is called the Two-Track Mind because it activates the part of your brain that is trying to focus on something other than the reading assignment.

The way to engage that second track of your brain is to become an active reader. Try this with a newspaper or magazine article. As you read, ask and answer some questions about the article. What is the main idea? What is the point of view of the author? What is the tone? What supporting ideas are being introduced? Try to anticipate where the author is going.

By engaging that second track of your brain, you are preventing your mind from wandering from the reading at hand. What you are also doing is thinking actively about the topic, which allows for better learning and understanding of a school assignment or passage of a standardized test.

Mastering the Two-Track Mind takes time, but doing so is well worth the investment. Developing critical reading skills needs to be a top priority because doing so raises standardized test scores, improves grades, lowers stress and frees up time so that those joys of summer can be enjoyed the other 10 months of the year.

Jake Neuberg lives in Pacific Palisades with his wife Mina and four kids. He is the Co-Founder of Revolution Prep, a leading provider of high-quality tutoring to students from elementary school to college. Revolution Prep has helped over one million students achieve higher grades, higher test scores and overall stronger skills in the core academic subject areas. Jake can be reached at jake@revolutionprep.com Send an email if you would like a reading list of material your kids will likely actually enjoy and that will be valuable to build those reading comprehension skills.