As a military spouse, you are often effectively a single mother (um, or father) — worse, you’re deployed away from supportive grandparents, siblings, and friends. That means when the military member is deployed, it’s totally up to you to keep often-unmotivated kids’ educational skills up over the summer. Most parents do this by using the summer reading list sent home by the teacher, and according to statistics and testing they do a great job (national pat-on-the-back).
However, teachers don’t tell you to teach math. Math is where America lags the most, and kids lose more and more math skills over summer as they age. The problem is, you can’t just open up the math skills list the teacher sent home for over the summer for things your kid can do to maintain what they’ve learned.
And over the summer, who wants to pin the kids to a desk when they want to be outside in the sun? For that matter, who has the time? But there are some things you can do to maintain math.
- Let them play video games – yes, video games. But make sure they’re math-heavy. RPG games are some of the best, because players have to learn how to calculate in their heads the best way to apply health points and things like that. You can ask at the game store for some good ones for your kids; the counter clerk will be excited that someone’s actually interested in the educational possibilities of video games!
- Let boys and girls cook with you. This is my favorite. It teaches two skills at once: first, cooking, valuable these days for either sex since home ec appears to have disappeared. Second, fractions can be taught beautifully if you just guide the child. When they’re used to cooking, double and half recipes to give them some extra challenges. Special bonus: you eat the lessons! If you want bonus points, go out and find a cooking chemistry book, and teach that as well. The smallest ones can use magnetic numbers and letters on the fridge while everyone else cooks.
- Don’t go for the Matchbox cars and Barbie dolls; look for engineering and geometric toys like Kinex sets. This teaches geometric and visualization skills that you can’t get at school, and will make geometry tons easier when your kid gets to it.
- If you want something more ordinary, and you’ve already done the cooking, get your kid an old-fashioned chemistry set. The same measuring and fraction skills are important, and the results are sometimes spectacular. (You can duplicate a lot of experiments with the kitchen chemistry book, though, so look into that as well.)
- The smallest ones may just need counting and basic adding; sorting things around the house for you may be ideal – silverware, linens, videos. This can be really helpful if you’re getting ready for yet-another-move.
Unfortunately, for high schoolers, none of this may keep up their skills (where in the normal household do you use calculus?) Go ahead and get books for subjects they’ll be learning next year for them to work in, and make working in them a part of the daily routine.