3 Strategies to Keep Your Learners’ Brains Primed During Summer.
Well, hello there!
We’re mere moments away from summer holidays... time to celebrate another year of academic successes and milestones reached!
Time to take an eight-week (actually, more like ten, but who’s counting?) break from anything to do with learning!
Sorry, folks. An eight-week break away from any skill-based activity is likely to be an eight-week recipe for making life more difficult than it needs to be. Don’t get me wrong; taking breaks is important for everything from our mental wellbeing to our physical health, to our learning of new skills and information. I am an advocate of break-taking. With a caveat:
Think back to the last holiday you took. Let’s imagine that you had the opportunity to take a week away from the everyday…
Maybe you were south at a tropical beach.
Maybe you were hiking on a trail in northern Ontario.
Maybe you were taking a stay-cation and enjoying time at home, just being.
Probably, by the time you got to day five or six, you were getting fidgety. Even more likely, by the time you were at day seven or ten, you were ready to get back to “normal”.
Humans are creatures of habit. Our brains generally thrive on routine. Taking breaks enables recharging, but taking prolonged breaks actually reverses the benefits.
I’ve noticed, in my 22+ year career as an educator, that the transition back to school in September is a big hurdle for pretty much everyone. Whether it’s young students, older students, neurotypical students, neurodivergent students, or teachers and administrators, to the letter everyone finds the first few weeks (or even months) difficult to manage. Research by Rui (2023) and Packer (2021) demonstrates that there is an optimal – or optimum – value for the duration of vacations / breaks / holidays. For the math-folk out there, it’s literally a downward-facing parabola; an upside-down, U-shaped curve.
This shape (the lower red curve in the diagram) tells us that short-duration breaks provide the least recovery, as do long-duration breaks. The optimum value for break duration appears to be approximately seven days. Mathematically, the optimum value is the maximum. Applied to our everyday life example, the same point can represent the maximum, or ideal, amount of time spent on holiday.
Clearly, this will vary between individuals, but the idea remains the same.
Putting this into the context of our eight WEEK break over summer, we can extrapolate that the difficulty with transitioning back to school in the fall may have some connection to the length of time our learners have been away from school. Summer break is eight times greater than the optimum amount of time, give or take.
Of course, I’m not advising that we only have one week off in the summer. Who wants that? We all benefit from time off, and more than a single week per year, or half, or even third.
Instead, I’m advising that we use the break time and manipulate it such that we not only give our learners time away from school, but we take advantage of that freedom to help their brains stay primed when they return to school.
How can we help our learners’ brains stay primed? Here are three different strategies that are generalised but also depend on age/stage:
Strategy 1:
When spending time with your learner, work in some organic math or language or science.
Garden, and talk about plant types, microclimates, ecosystems, and climate.
Bake, and measure ingredients, including conversions between recipe amounts and metric to imperial units.
Go for a bike ride, look at a map first, determine the distance, and then calculate the rate of travel based on how long Google Maps says it will take.
Including these learning moments in everyday activities might sound sneaky. Reframe this by considering that when our brains are fully engaged in an activity, organic learning is more likely to stick for the long term.
Strategy 2:
For older students, encourage reading for pleasure or interest. For reluctant readers, searching for online articles of interest can help.
If you are able to eat a meal together each week, have a weekly theme. Everyone comes to the table with one article they have found that reflects that theme.
The discussion that follows as each person provides a 60-second elevator pitch to summarise their article of interest will not only get everyone talking, it will give the learners’ brains casual opportunities to practise the skills they will need come the fall.
If family dinners just aren’t your thing, but you travel for sports or holidays, consider the same theme-based strategy for the car ride. Bonus: everyone gets a captive audience!
Strategy 3:
A bit of blatant self-promotion here:
Seriously consider scheduling summer priming sessions with SEED Education, with weekly sessions to review the past year’s concepts for July, followed by a focus on preview for next year’s ideas in August.
Not only does this provide the benefits listed above, the regular routine will also help all learners’ brains – no matter the age, stage, or learning profile – make the transition back to school more easily come end August and into September.
Summer sessions have fewer time constraints than school-year sessions do. We play more games, have more fun, and engage brains in a more casual way than we do throughout the school year.
The end result, regardless of which strategy you choose: a learner whose brain is ready to go back to classes when the time comes, both with content and with strategy.
Stay tuned for more blog posts, Instagram posts, and news about upcoming changes at SEED Education!
Until then, I wish everyone a fabulously relaxing summer – may you enjoy everything and everyone you love.
Yours in learning,
L
References
Cooper, J. (n.d.). 3.2 Properties of Quadratic Relations - ppt download. SlidePlayer. Retrieved June 12, 2024, from https://slideplayer.com/slide/8436133/
Cui, R. (2023, March). Travel duration and the restorative effects of holiday experiences: an inverted U-shape. Tourism Review, 78(9). 10.1108/TR-06-2022-0268
Packer, J. (2021, May). Taking a break: Exploring the restorative benefits of short breaks and vacations. Annals of Tourism Research Empirical Insights, 2(1). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666957920300069
