Summer has hit…Steps to take to Improve Learning Skills Over the Summer

 

Here is a practical ‘down and dirty’ Action plan to Improve Learning Skills

1. Decompress, take a breather for a few days. Few is the key word here – take a few days to decompress and then you are re-invigorated to get going. 2. Go through your papers and books that you used this past school year. What areas were easy, what areas were hard? 3.  After sorting out the easy and hard, let’s start addressing the hard areas, the areas that were more difficult for you. There is an underlying root cause of the learning struggles. You may want to go through our informal comprehensive screening tool to identify the underlying causes of your child’s learning problems to see exactly why they have a hard time with reading, writing, spelling, study skills, or math. 4. Develop an action plan to address the root causes of your child’s struggles that will push them forward so that when school starts in the fall they will be ready. Remember, if your child struggles with learning or just takes too long to do their homework, there is a reason for it. Once you identify the underlying root cause of their learning struggle and address it, the 'magic' happens. Learning becomes easy. 5.  Your action plan should be simple, just take about 20 minutes a day so you actually do implement it. There is nothing worse than developing a plan of action to work on your child's learning skills but then get overwhelmed by it. No one does well in a state of overwhelm. In fact, most often almost nothing gets accomplished when you are in a state of overwhelm. So, keep your plan simple but effective. This is one plan that has been extremely effective over the years for me.

• Put your summer learning skills plan into action – 20 minutes a day
• Day One: improving reading fluency in 5 minutes, improving spelling in 15 minutes
• Day Two: fluency in 5 minutes, reading a selection 5 minutes, note taking in 10 minutes.
• Rotate activities every other day.

6.  Play learning games to improve learning skills ... have a game day or game night each week and play learning games See the improve learning skills games in action.

Improve Learning Skills: Summer organizational tips…

1. Store the best samples of your child's work. I keep one box per child. 2. Then, just start throwing other things away. 3. Store what you want to save for use another year, and then make a pile of items that you can give away or sell. 4. Getting rid of all of the "stuff" just sitting around will help to eliminate visual clutter and may reveal some learning items that you had totally forgotten! 5. You CAN do it. Don't keep putting it off. Even if you can't get it all done in one day, you can still make some progress. It's going to be worth it! And, you’ll have greater focus so you can improve learning skills in 20 minutes a day.