Summer Math
Every spring, families reach out asking how they can support their child’s math during the summer. They worry that their children will succumb to the ‘summer slide’ - the annual loss of learning that occurs during the summer months – and wonder what they can do to help avoid this common phenomenon. While summer offers an important break from the daily demands of the school year, it is also a time when students lose momentum for learning and consequently can struggle in the fall to pick up from where they left off at the end of the previous year.
However, there are many simple and joyful things families can do to maintain and even bolster their students’ math skills over the summer:
- Play Games: Games are one of the best tools we have to engage children in strategic and logical thinking. While they are powerful any time of the year, game playing in the summertime offers a chance to interact with family and friends in an intellectual and cognitively demanding setting. From card games and board games to complex strategy and cooperative games, family game playing is an excellent way to keep thinking skills sharp and to hone executive functions including focus, planning and organization.
- Sums to 10 Go Fish: Remove the 10s and face cards from a standard deck. Follow the regular rules of Go Fish but instead of matching numbers, try to pair numbers that add to 10.
- Garbage: Cards are laid out in a 2x5 grid, similar to a 10-frame. Players draw cards and place them in order in the grid, replacing the card that is there.
- Multiplication War: Each player draws two cards and multiplies them to find the product. The high products wins. Play with face cards (J=11, Q=12, K=13) for an added challenge.
- 24: Place four cards face up in the center of the table. Use the four cards and any operations to generate an expression with a value of 24. Make this game cooperative or competitive by racing to create the expression or dealing out 4 cards to each player.
- Do Puzzles: Puzzles promote planning and reasoning, and come in all shapes and sizes. Standard jigsaw puzzles foster visual/spatial skills and children can complete them independently or cooperatively depending on the size and number of pieces. Puzzle and math activity books are easy for children to take to the beach, on long cars trips, or to camp. Finally, online puzzles and puzzle apps are available anytime and anywhere – while a parent is shopping, while waiting for a sibling to finish sports practice, while dinner is being prepared.
- Beast Academy Puzzle Books; Beast Academy is the elementary school math program created by the folks at Art of Problem Solving. Their puzzle books are challenging and engaging for students. Scroll through the list to the puzzle piece icons to find the puzzle books for each level.
- NYTimes Online Games: In addition to fan favorites like Wordle and Connections, New York Times Games includes two math puzzles: Pips and Sudoku. Both puzzles can be played at multiple levels and encourage logical reasoning and problem solving.
- Highlights: Ultimate Puzzle Challenge
- This is Not a Math Book: A Smart Art Activity Book
- A Puzzle a Day – Rearrange the pentomino pieces to solve a new puzzle for each calendar day.
- Practice Skills: Mastering new skills takes time, patience and a lot of practice. The summer is a great time to get in a lot of reps of grade level math work. Brimmer students are encouraged to engage in regular and frequent practice of grade level skills throughout the summer. For daily exercises, we recommend the Summer Skills Sharpener [LC1] book series. Students should also practice their math facts - addition and subtraction within 20 for students in grades K-2, and multiplication facts through 12x12 for students in grades 3-5. Fact fluency is more than just memorization of math facts. Students who are fluent are accurate, efficient and flexible in their math thinking. (This article from Bridges’ Math Learning Center, explains more about the difference between memorization and fluency and why fluency should be our goal.)
Here are some additional resources for families looking to hone grade level skills:
- Fluency by Heart (free): Students in grades 2-5 have access to this platform in school and can log in at home over the summer. Families can also set up their own accounts.
- Dreambox (paid): This app is an excellent choice for families looking for an online option for conceptually based review and practice.
- Find Joy: In this recent podcast episode titled, Math at Home, math education experts Zak Champagne and Mike Flynn discuss on simple and productive ways that families can support math learning at home. In addition to highlighting games and fluency practice (with specific suggestions for games as well as more information about our fact practice platform, Fluency by Heart) they are emphatic that all home math experiences should start and end with joy. And since summer is an especially joyful time, summer math should be joyful as well!
Summer is a time for playing, puzzling, and exploring; it is a time for connecting and interacting with family and friends. Maintaining math skills during the summer does not have to be a departure from these quintessential summer delights. By infusing mathematical thinking into daily summer routines, parents can mitigate summer learning loss and increase opportunities to experience math joy.
Brimmer and May School
69 Middlesex Road
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
617-566-7462
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
617-566-7462
As an inclusive private school community, Brimmer welcomes students who will increase the diversity of our school. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, sex, gender, gender identity and expression, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, or any other characteristic protected from discrimination under state or federal law, in the administration of our educational policies, admissions practices, financial aid decisions, and athletic and other school-administered programs.