The leading psychiatrists advise you to focus on cultivating and protecting your child’s physical and mental health throughout the summer vacation. You can protect his physical health through healthy nutrition and regular exercise. Likewise, you can protect his mental health by ensuring that he gets enough sleep and remains stress-free. However, it is also important to make the child acquire both knowledge and skills by implementing a summer vacation study plan.
The summer vacation study plan will help you to stimulate and sharpen the child’s mind, along with boosting his confidence, creativity, and innovation. But you must remember that students often find it challenging to focus and study during summer vacations. While preparing the school holiday study plan, you need to ensure that the child must not experience stress and fatigue by studying for long hours.
At the same time, you must motivate and encourage the child regularly to acquire and retain knowledge. The study plan must focus on enhancing your child’s knowledge and creativity by combining multiple learning resources – textbooks, practice exams, self-tests, and additional content. At the same time, it must focus on making the kid acquire knowledge and skills without affecting his physical and mental health. That is why; you must look for innovative ideas while preparing the summer vacation study plan.
9 Ideas to Consider While Making a Summer Vacation Study Plan for Your Child
Allow the Child to Relax and Unwind for Two Weeks
Children look for summer vacations to get an opportunity to skip studying and learning. You will make the child experience emotional stress without allowing him to relax, unwind, rest, and recharge properly. It is always advisable to allow the child to stay away from textbooks and digital content for the first two weeks of the summer vacation. The rest and relaxation will motivate your child to enjoy summer learning without experiencing stress.
Restrict Daily Study Schedules to Two Hours
Your summer vacation study plan must not make the child study for longer hours. You can cultivate the child’s mental health by encouraging him to indulge in many exciting summer vacation activities for students along with studying. You can keep summer studying stress-free only by making the kid learn for about two hours on weekdays. Also, you can keep the summer study goals realistic to ensure that the child need not study for longer hours.
Adopt Spaced Learning Approach
You cannot motivate and encourage a child to study during summer vacation simply by shortening the study schedules. In addition to keeping summer study schedules short, you need to adopt spaced education approach.
According to Instancy.com,
“Spaced learning comprises breaking a long course into several sessions or modules of shorter durations with breaks in between the sessions. With this approach of teaching, learners can retain the information taught in the course.”
You can make it easier for the child to acquire and retain knowledge by making him switch from one topic or subject to another at regular intervals.
Focus on Bridging Knowledge Gap
You can use summer studying as an opportunity to bridge the knowledge gap created due to misunderstanding or inadequate understanding of topics or concepts. In addition to making your child learn new topics and concepts, you must focus on making him understand the old topics or concepts clearly. While implementing a summer vacation study plan, you must identify the knowledge gap by asking your child relevant questions. You can easily bridge the knowledge gap by providing your child with relevant content and on-time assistance.
Don’t Try to Complete the Syllabus
While planning summer study, many parents focus on making their children cover a large part of the syllabus. You will affect the child’s mental health by making him study for longer hours during summer vacation. You need to ensure that the summer study plan must focus on boosting the child’s brainpower without increasing mental stress. It is always advisable to pick certain topics or concepts from the syllabus that your child loves to learn. You can stimulate the child’s brainpower by revising the old course materials during the summer vacation.
Provide Access to an Online Digital Library
As technology-enabled platforms, digital libraries enhance your child’s learning experience by providing access to a variety of digital content – ebooks, audiobooks, videos, journals, and magazines. Digital libraries help students to acquire knowledge by reading, watching, and listening. Your child can further access the digital content anytime and anywhere using mobile devices. You can easily persuade and motivate the kid to enabling him to access a robust online digital library.
Focus on Enhancing Communication Skills
Online learning impacted the communication level between students and teachers adversely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, the communication skills of students were affected because of the growing adoption of informal communication channels like audio calls, private video calls, and instant messages. While preparing a summer vacation study plan, you must boost your child’s communication skills by encouraging him to write short stories or maintain a journal. You can even make the child talk and interact confidently by making phone calls and live video calls instead of sending emails and instant messages.
Encourage the Child to Interact and Collaborate
Many children these days feel motivated and confident when they interact with other students. You can easily motivate the child to learn during summer vacation by encouraging him to study by collaborating with other students on online groups. These online groups will make your child confident by answering the questions posted by other students. Also, the child can clear doubts by posting questions. The online collaboration and interactions will make the summer studying experience fun for the kid.
Prepare Your Kid to Return Back to School
The children will experience a range of emotions while returning back to school after the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to UNICEF,
“The return to school will be welcome and exciting for many students, but others will be feeling anxious or frightened.”
Your summer vacation study plan must support and prepare the child to return back to school without feeling frightened and anxious. In addition to keeping the child safe in the post-pandemic world, you must make him feel confident and comfortable enough to switch from online learning to classroom-based learning seamlessly.
While preparing a summer vacation study plan, you must focus on making your child acquire knowledge and skills while remaining relaxed and stress-free. You must encourage and motivate him to study during the summer vacation by providing access to a variety of digital content. At the same time, you must make summer studying fun by allowing him to relax and unwind.
