While summer vacation is always looked forward to by students, parents, and teachers, a growing body of research indicates that students lose some of the skills they learned over the previous school year. Whether it is math, reading, or spelling, without frequent practice, these skills can fall by the wayside. This is commonly known as the “summer learning loss” or even the “summer slump” or “summer slide”. Oftentimes, teachers spend a few weeks in the beginning of the school year re-teaching skills lost to the summer slide.
This especially holds true for our friends who need extra help from a speech-language pathologist, occupational therapist, or physical therapist. Weekly therapy appointments are crucial to making progress. Your child’s treatment plan is most effective when he or she attends therapy consistently. When your child has made great progress during the school year, taking the summer off may not lend itself to continued progress, and you may even see a regression in skills.
While we may not be able to change our summer vacation schedule, parents can still do something about the summer slump! Bringing your children to their weekly therapy appointments and practicing skills at home are easy ways to help with carry-over of skills- and still leave plenty of time to enjoy summer activities.
Summer vacation is well deserved and should be enjoyed, but that doesn’t mean therapy should be left behind! Check out https://galvintherapycenter.com/programs/summer-programs for more information about how our Summer Sessions can help your child build and maintain skills he/she has learned! And check out http://www.summerlearning.org/ to learn more about the summer slump and why summer learning is so important.