Active Engagement During the Summer Break
The uncertainty of the 2021-22 school year is looming with us continuing to discuss the educational shifts and what “normal” looks like. As we think about preparing our children for September, it is hard because we don’t know, even schools don’t know, if the pandemic is truly over, if the students will be able to return to regular schedules without anxiety, and if we even want to go back to the pace that we had built before March 2020. Rather than focusing on the uncertain start to the year, we might want to focus on continuing the active engagement that students developed since the start of COVID.
You may ask what active engagement means. It describes the skills behind the obvious academic skills, the organizing, planning and self-monitoring that are necessary for success. In other words, active engagement is successfully using your executive functions. During the pandemic, in order to complete tasks and fill time that was previously regimented by school and activity schedules, students had to actively engage in ways that they never had before. They had to consider what interested them to fill free time and determine the planning and preparation that was needed for school success. That greater self-awareness and self-motivation can be continued into the summer and fall with a few changes to how we, the adults, approach our children’s engagement in planning and executing their tasks and activities.
If you are taking a vacation this summer, ask your child to research the area and plan activities that they would be interested in trying. When my children were young, we did this for a trip to Disney World. My son ultimately researched the park, times when rides are more and less crowded and created an entire schedule for going on rides in the park. He was very proud of his work and our success in avoiding crowds while doing everything that we hoped to include into our time in the park.
If your child began cooking during the pandemic, include them in meal planning and have them choose meals that they would like to prepare for family dinners. Many students have discussed really enjoying the family dinners that could happen during the pandemic. Finding time to continue that will help students keep perspective on what is most important. If your child found a love for, and time for reading, have them develop a weekly schedule for when they could go (either ride their bike, walk, or be driven) to the library to find new books.
Children with summer reading or summer packets to complete should create a work schedule, using a month-at-a-glance calendar to break the assigned work down into daily activities. Establishing a regular time for this will make it much easier to complete the work without any upset. Students should own this task and actively engage with developing their work calendar, then present their schedule to their parents.
All of the back-and-forth planning that you will do with your young children, to guarantee active engagement, can be done through dinner conversation or journaling. A great way to keep younger children writing during the summer is through journaling with them. You write to them at night, and they answer during or right after breakfast. Children love to wake up to their new message and are happy to respond, even if they are resistant writers. Older children should be allowed to complete work and plan activities without much adult supervision or input. The more independent they can be, the more they are strengthening their executive functions.
Ultimately, the pandemic was trying and tiring. Our children need an enjoyable summer, but they don’t need to lose the skills that they developed. Having them engage a bit more in the planning and implementation of their summer activities will help them with self-awareness and self-monitoring when the school year starts. And, those strengthened executive functions will only make the school year better!