Keeping Brains Active
Rest, recharge, play and learn this summer.
by Richard Bavaria, Ph.D.

TWEENS & TEENS News May/June 2008

Did you know that within 24 to 48 hours after learning new concepts, students often begin to forget information unless it is reinforced or applied immediately? That’s why, during summer break, even the best students forget lessons they have learned during the school year.

Summer vacation is great for recharging your batteries. Still, if you aren’t using the skills you acquired in the classroom, you could find yourself lagging behind once the school bell rings again. However you plan to fill those lazy days of summer, don’t take a break from learning. Following are ways that your summer activities can help you continue to learn, in a fun way, when you’re away from the classroom.

Go Grocery Shopping and Get Cooking. Help Mom or Dad with the grocery shopping and cooking. When you’re calculating which size bottle of ketchup is the best value, weighing fruits and vegetables or making change with the cashier, you’re strengthening valuable math skills. Back home in the kitchen, measuring ingredients and using planning and organizational abilities are other real-life applications of math skills. Pick your favorite recipe, plan how much time you’ll need to prepare the dish or dessert and start measuring those ingredients.

Keep a Travel Journal. You don’t have to write reports or research papers to improve your writing skills. Consider filling a journal with descriptions of your activities away from home this summer or documenting your family vacations. Where did you stay? What did you see? Whom did you meet? Keeping a diary or a journal not only strengthens your writing skills, it also preserves great memories and helps you remember people you met along the way. Not venturing far this summer? Maybe you enjoy writing letters or e-mailing grandparents or friends. It doesn’t matter what you write— just write!

Read. You can refrain from reading text books during the summer and still engage your mind with the written word. That’s what leisurely reading is all about! Go to the bookstore or your local library and choose literature that you’ll enjoy reading. What interests you? What are your hobbies or what would you like to learn more about? There are books and magazines on every topic. Whether you’d like to learn tales of the ancient Mayan civilizations or figure out how to change the spark plugs in your father’s car, a book in your local library can help. And, remember, magazines and comic books count as reading materials.

Solve Puzzles and Play Games. Many family games and puzzles entertain while helping to develop and reinforce cognitive skills. A simple card game may require you to use mathematics and logical thinking skills, and some video games demand complex analysis and reasoning abilities. Take turns with your siblings playing banker in Monopoly® or play a game of Yahtzee® and calculate the odds of rolling specific number combinations with the dice. Dominoes also explore the concepts of probability.

Surf the Internet. The Internet offers a wealth of information and serves as a great educational tool. Going on a road trip with your parents? Find a map and calculate the distance and number of hours it will take to reach your destination. Want to enlarge a photo from a 4x5 to an 8x10? Determine how enlarging it will affect the photo’s resolution and picture quality. Want to know more about a main character in a movie? Research the movie’s screenplay and learn more about the cast and similar titles on www.imdb.com.

Be Creative. Many popular movies are based on books and, sometimes, they completely veer from the original scripts. Before you watch another movie this summer, read the book. Then, adapt the book into your own screenplay. Describe the cast of characters and create a theatrical budget for props, costumes, lighting and popcorn for your opening night performance. Ask your friends to act in your show and videotape the scenes with a home video camera. Then, post your directorial debut on a favorite Web site or personal blog.

Attend Summer Camps. Summer camps come in all shapes and sizes. There are academic camps, wilderness camps, scouting camps, art camps, music camps and athletic camps. There are day camps and sleepaway camps that involve staying overnight for a night, a week or several weeks. Choose a summer camp that seems engaging and fun, and will keep you learning throughout the summer and into the new school year.

Work. Some tweens and teens choose to spend their summer vacations as employees and entrepreneurs, earning extra money by babysitting, mowing lawns or scooping ice cream at the parlor around the corner. Create a budget to plan for the items you want to buy with your hard-earned money. In doing so, you learn how to perform a job as well as how to apply math skills that will come in handy for the rest of your life. By keeping a spreadsheet listing how many hours you work each week and how much money you earn, you can keep track of how close you are to reaching your financial goals. The spreadsheet may be the inspiration you need some days as you check out how close you are to that new MP3 player, bike or back-to-school shopping spree.

There are many ways to enhance your academic skills with standard activities— without spending your summer break doing “schoolwork.” Whether you like to cook, listen to music, write in your diary, travel, go to camp or even mow the lawn, make your hobbies work for you. The lazy days of summer are imminent, but back-to-school time is just around the corner.

Richard Bavaria, Ph.D., is the vice president of education for Sylvan Learning Center, a leading provider of in-center and live online tutoring to students of all ages and skill levels. With nearly 1,200 centers located throughout North America, Sylvan’s methods have led more than 2 million students to discover the joy of learning, with personalized instruction in reading, writing, mathematics, study skills and test prep for college entrance and state exams. For more information, call (800)31-SUCCESS or visit www.tutoring.sylvanlearning.com.