Curtailing Your Child's Summer Brain Drain by Samantha

Children can lose up to 40% of the learning gains they have made over the school year if stimulating learning opportunities halt over the summer months. There’s extensive neuroscience research evidence that taking an extended break from learning during the summer can impact students’ retention and engagement for the next school year according to research published in the American Educational Research Journal.

“But we need a break!” I hear you. Many students and parents are counting the days until summer vacation for a well-deserved break. It’s a great time to rest, rejuvenate, and hit the reset button. It’s also the perfect opportunity to apply the tools and strategies learned during the academic year to carry out non-academic tasks, significantly contributing to building a child’s essential executive functioning skills toolkit.

What are executive skills, and why are they important?

We rely on our executive functions in our daily lives, from planning our day to remembering to pack our lunch or mapping out our next road trip. They are developmental in nature and are housed in the brain’s ‘management department’ and are essential contributors to tasks being carried out and completed. Adults often take these learned skills for granted, assuming children will “naturally learn” how to organize, stay focused, persist, prepare, and plan.

However, for a child with ADHD, lagging executive skills are inevitable and can be the root cause of stress, anxiety, shame and frustration at home and school. A youngster with an ADHD diagnosis can delay their executive function skill acquisition by up to 30%.

Youngsters with weak executive skills can be disorganized and forgetful, need help getting started on assignments and easily get distracted from non-preferred tasks. They can also experience challenges regulating their emotions due to frustration and overwhelm. However, the good news is that these skills can be taught, learned, and practiced in both formal and informal situations. With patience, practice, persistence and, most importantly, positivity, adults can foster the development of these essential skills in their children.

What can parents and caregivers do to help develop these skills?

Learning is a habit. Training one’s brain and keeping it active and strengthened is just like keeping one’s physical body in shape. You need to keep at it consistently to see noticeable results! Anyone who has taken two months off from the gym knows what I am talking about. The brain is no different.

But don’t worry, you don’t need to convince your young person to bury themselves in textbooks and rigorous online academic classes to stop them from falling behind over the summer break. Instead, consider providing your youngster with real-life opportunities to build and reinforce their essential executive functioning skills over school breaks.

Here are a few simple ideas that our students and parents find especially helpful and fun!

• Plan and organize a family/friend gathering. Delegate the planning and organization of a family gathering or friend hangout to your child. This can include emailing/communications, follow-up, calendar scheduling, creating lists, purchasing food/drinks, seating charts, food allergy alerts, working within a budget etc. Your child likely needs to practice and learn all the steps you ‘naturally’ take to plan an event. The only way to do this? Experience!
• Travel & transportation scheduling Bus and train schedules, airport departures and arrivals, and the timing of transfers require exceptional executive skills. If your child is old enough, have them plan a bus/train trip from one end of a city or town to the other. If your child has never taken a bus or train and is now driving a car, have them take on this challenge for a week. They’ll appreciate their vehicle (and you!) even more.
• Organization of space Plan and organize a homework space on a rainy day. Get rid of the OLD and bring in the NEW! File old papers and recycle irrelevant materials. Purchase and set up new materials. Plan and decorate this new space to be welcoming with limited distractions. Beat the back-to-school crowds and take a stress-free visit to purchase supplies ahead of time.
• Reading without stress or tests Some children love to read book after book all summer long… my son’s DID NOT fit that profile. My favourite app for reluctant readers is www.audible.com, which can make reading accessible, inclusive, and exciting. Plus, the user can adjust the speed of the reader, making it more palatable. My boys still followed along with the physical book but played the audio simultaneously, increasing their attention, engagement, enjoyment of reading, and overall comprehension. You can also do this as a family book club with treats and special summer drinks.
• Exploring Passion Projects Engaging with a choice passion project that your child couldn’t explore at school is motivating and exciting. Ask them to choose a theme or area of interest and then dive into models, books, museums, videos, fieldtrips, magazines and more! Have them organize and creatively share their project at a family fun night.
• Organization of digital files, emails and downloads Many students simply hit ‘save’ or ‘download’ throughout the school year and don’t plan where their files are stored. Help them to organize their email accounts and storage. Take 15 mins a day to have them begin sorting, creating folders, organizing within the folders, deleting, and unsubscribing.
• Work with an executive skills coach. An executive skill coach can continue momentum alongside your student with passion projects and other real-life integration experiences to build their executive skills throughout the summer and school year.

The more consistent we are with helping our students build executive function skills year-round, the more success the student will experience. Consistency with new habits is a crucial element to transformations in behaviour. When we are consistent in building these skills, we see momentum leading to healthy life-long habits. By actively avoiding the summer brain drain with naturally engaging opportunities, you will be surprised how prepared and confident your child will feel for future learning and life.

About Samantha, Founder, Kaizen Education Services                                                    

Over 25 years ago, Samantha Woods, Founder of Kaizen Education Services, recognized that her students’ success in life goes well beyond intelligence and academic skills. After taking a neuroscience research hiatus, Samantha discovered that lagging executive functioning skills were at the root of many of her ADHD students’ challenges. Since then, she has developed a successful executive skills coaching program for students and adults who live with an ADHD diagnosis and recognize that building these invaluable skills can lead to a lifetime of success and peace. Samantha now spends her time presenting and sharing research based practical tools & strategies with educators, parents and anyone invested in making good change (Kai-zen) happen with a young person in their life. Her latest passion is building Kaizen’s “Brain Hub Academy,” an online digital ADHD coaching platform to strategically teach these essential skills to students of all ages across the world.

Kaizen Education Services is a social enterprise focusing on executive brain functioning development from the classroom to the boardroom.  Kaizen is currently transforming their in-person executive skills coaching program to a digital platform so more adults can feel empowered to support the young people in their lives.