For many children, the summer months can be a time of boredom, filled with long hours of mindless video games and unimaginative television watching. Studies have shown that students can lose anywhere between one to three months of learning over the summer break, especially in the areas of math and reading.

With state budgets stretching barely enough to fund remedial skills, students who otherwise depended on summer school courses for accelerated or enrichment classes may, too, find themselves out of luck. Other children will depend on daycare as their only means of recreation. Parents express concern that their children will have nothing to do and nothing to learn over the summer. They are looking for affordable alternatives.

Fortunately, parents can help their children keep up their reading, writing and math skills over the summer at little cost:
• Visit the library – many public libraries have summer reading programs that set daily or weekly goals for children of ALL ages. Children keep track of the books or minutes they’ve read and turn in their logs for age-appropriate prizes.
• Purchase a plain notebook to be used as a summer or vacation journal. Have your child decorate the notebook with scraps of colored paper or items cut from a magazine or free travel brochures that you picked up on vacation. When that first writing assignment of the school year, “How I spent my summer vacation,” materializes in the Fall, your child will have pages of topics and pictures ready to go.
• A pair (or more) of dice is the source for innumerable math games. Simply roll the dice and add, subtract or multiply the results. Whoever comes up with the correct answer wins the round. You can find dozens of instructions for other dice games at: http://www.activityvillage.co.uk/dice_games.htm  Math Dice by ThinkFun (http://www.thinkfun.com/mathdice) is hugely popular in my house, even with my math-phobic, 15-year old nephew.

More structured continuing education over the summer break is the key to a positive school year ahead. It is a chance for children to master important skills or to further explore areas of interest in a fun, creative way. If your child’s educational needs exceed the ideas above, you may want to consider summer tutoring to:

• Rebuild self-esteem that was battered by bad grades from the previous school year.
• Close the achievement gap by helping students catch up and get ahead before the start of the new school year.
• Prepare high school students with the strategies, skills, and confidence to take upcoming ACT and SAT tests.
• Reinforce skills for children with learning disabilities, who might otherwise lose skills from a two or three month separation from formal learning.
• Enable students to master benchmarks necessary for passing state reading, writing, and math standardized tests.

Find out more about how Club Z! can enhance your child’s summer by visiting our web site at:  www.clubztutoring.com/LehighValley or by calling 610-351-3500.