This 2015 article from edCircuit Staff offers parents ways to keep math, reading, science and play going over the summer, with comments from teachers Diane Robusto and Noha Mols. An updated section below the original reviews what test data from 2019 to 2026 show about summer learning loss and which summer learning activities have evidence behind them.
F or 180 days each year, most kids are in school, brains engaged and learning. Then along comes the summer and for many, learning comes to a screeching halt.
It’s not like there’s absolutely no brain activity happening over the summer, but by the time they go back to school, many students forget some of the skills they learned. The Washington Post reports that in a recent survey, 66% of teachers say they spend most of the first month of school teaching concepts that students have forgotten over the break.
Call it “summer brain drain” or “summer slide,” educators say it’s a real phenomenon and that math skills seem to be the quickest to disappear. But reading skills suffer, too. And even the youngest students experience the slide. Diane Robusto is a Pre-K teacher in Virginia Beach, Virginia. “I spend all of September reviewing the alphabet,” she says.
As a parent, you want your kids to be kids and enjoy their summer. Few parents would advocate noses-in-books throughout summer recess. But in keeping with the idea that learning should be fun and interesting, summer also presents a great opportunity for kids to practice skills and explore things that they enjoy. And experts say that you don’t have to teach your kids anything new, just reinforce the skills they already have.
In other words, it’s possible for parents to “sneak in” a little learning even when there’s no classroom, and the curriculum connections are stronger than you may think.
Bringing Math Into Summer Fun
It’s easy to merge a little summer fun with math. Since those skills seem to disappear first, here are some ideas to consider:
*Cook up a recipe with your kids, but make only half of the quantity. Challenge kids to do the math to make sure the recipe turns out right.
*Teach young kids how to play card games, like “War,” to reinforce the concepts of “greater than,” “less than” and “equal.”
*Use dice or dominoes to play number games. Have your child roll the dice, then add up the numbers they display. Take one cube away. How many spots are left?
*Have older kids plan your next car trip, from calculating distances and driving times to planning stops for food and gas, budgeting costs and even determining whether it’s cheaper to drive or fly.
Science and Reading Beyond the Classroom
Beyond math, there are other subjects that can be easily incorporated into summer fun: Use the Internet to help kids identify insects and plants they find in the yard. Invest in an inexpensive telescope. Point out the planets, constellations and phases of the moon in the summer sky. Go online to find out what makes a firefly light up.
Noha Mols is a special education teacher and lead tutor strategist at Ashley Tutors. She tells edCircuit, “I believe summer is a time to learn, practice and apply some skills students learn throughout the school year. However, it should look differently; it should be fun and creative.”
Robusto agrees that it’s important to keep kids’ brains stimulated in fun ways. She advises parents to continue to read with them, and encourage their kids to read words they see on street signs and other places.
The vacation season is the perfect time to take in a trip to a local (or distant) museum or historical site. On the way there, or even on the way to the grocery store, there are easy ways to keep kids engaged in words. Robusto says to encourage kids to read the words they see on street signs, or challenge them to “find a word that begins with the letter ‘A’,” and so on. She says making a game of it makes it even more fun.
And you don’t have to travel far or spend a lot of money to reinforce basic skills. “Take your children to a dollar store and let them pick out short workbooks,” advises Robusto. “Kids are more engaged when they’ve chosen the books themselves, and they feel a sense of accomplishment when the book is finished,” she says. “Kids love to get to the end of a book.”
Websites including the NEA, Washington Post, Mother Nature Network and Family Education offer additional ideas from educators and parents for stopping summer brain drain. Some websites, like Otterbox.com, highlight apps that can keep the learning going all summer long.
Summer Camps and Unstructured Play
There are also new approaches to summer camp that mix social skills with brain power. The modern camp is not necessarily all about swimming and rowing. Mols says that thematic camps are very popular in British Columbia, where she teaches. Their themes range from nature to STEM to culinary arts to history and beyond. There’s a camp for almost every interest.
“Summer camps are a perfect option to let students be kids,” Mols says. “Let them play, make friends and try something new, make mistakes and learn from them.”
And don’t underestimate the benefits of unstructured play. The cognitive benefits of play are well-documented in scientific studies. Play can improve memory, attention span, language and problem-solving. Let kids exercise their imaginations while they do what they want to do.
Finally, remember that interacting with you is what your child values most. “Kids love to play games, but really love it when their parents are involved,” says Robusto. Learning should always be fun, but learning with Mom or Dad is an experience kids remember for a lifetime.
That’s a memory that can’t be drained away.
Summer brain drain in 2026: what the research says and how families keep learning going
Summer brain drain, also called summer slide or summer learning loss, is the decline in some academic skills that can happen while school is out. The article above, first published in 2015, quotes Pre-K teacher Diane Robusto on spending September reviewing the alphabet and special education teacher Noha Mols on keeping summer learning fun and creative. Test data collected since then show a more varied picture than one number suggests, and that picture helps families choose summer learning activities with more confidence. For a broader look at the topic, edCircuit’s article on summer learning that restores balance covers the planning side.
How much do students lose over the summer?
The largest study followed students through the summers between grades 1 and 6. Allison Atteberry and Andrew McEachin used an NWEA database of more than 200 million test scores from nearly 18 million students in 7,500 districts, covering 2008 to 2016, and published the work in the American Educational Research Journal in 2020. According to the American Educational Research Association’s summary, the average student lost between 17 and 28 percent of school-year gains in English language arts and between 25 and 34 percent in math, depending on grade, and more than half of students showed losses year after year. The spread was wide. In grade 2 math, students at the high end gained an extra 32 percent of their school-year gains over the summer, while students at the low end lost nearly 90 percent.
Megan Kuhfeld’s 2019 analysis of 3.4 million students reached a related conclusion: summer loss is common but not inevitable, and the students who lost the most were those who had gained the most during the school year. A loss in September therefore does not by itself mean a child had a weak year.
More recent data add a caution about size. K-12 Dive’s May 2026 report on an NWEA analysis of spring and fall 2023 scores for students in kindergarten through grade 8 found a math drop equal to about 10 to 30 percent of a typical school year’s learning, while average reading scores stayed nearly the same. Students ranged widely, and the researchers could not explain why some gained and others lost, partly because summer activities are poorly measured. NWEA suggests children may read outside school more often than they practice math, and that procedural math skills may fade faster. The same report notes a separate April study of four testing tools, in which three showed drops or flattening and one national dataset showed learning slowing but not dropping after kindergarten and first grade. Summer loss is real in the data, but its size depends on the test, the subject and the grade. The 66 percent teacher figure quoted in the original comes from one news-reported survey, whereas these studies follow the same students over time.
What the research says about summer learning activities
RAND’s review for the Wallace Foundation, Investing in Successful Summer Programs (2019), examined 83 studies and found 43 programs with research strong enough to meet federal evidence standards. Most improved at least one outcome, but only 34 percent of the outcomes measured were both significant and positive. Academic, at-home learning, social and emotional, and career programs all showed benefits in some studies. The features that mattered were focus on a specific need, enough hours of instruction and good implementation. Most of the research concerned reading, and the review could not judge the effectiveness of sleepaway camps or physical education programs. Thematic camps like the ones Mols describes may well be worthwhile, but a family should choose them for interest and social benefit rather than expect measured test-score gains.
Play has its own evidence. The American Academy of Pediatrics’ 2018 clinical report on play, summarized for parents at HealthyChildren.org, describes play as supporting executive function, social, emotional, language and cognitive skills. It advises parents to say yes when children ask to play and to limit media that displaces play. That supports the original article’s advice to protect unstructured time.
Practical ideas for families and teachers
The research and the original article point to a few decisions that fit a normal summer:
- Keep reading frequent and easy, as Robusto suggests. Books chosen by the child, signs read on the road and short workbooks the child picks out all count. Reading tends to hold up better over the summer than math.
- Give math a light, regular place, since math shows the larger average losses. Cooking with a halved recipe, card games, dice and trip budgets from the original are all ways to practice without worksheets.
- Choose camps and programs by fit. Ask what the program aims to teach, how many hours it runs and who the staff are, because focus, dosage and quality are what the RAND review found mattered.
- Protect unstructured play and time with family, which the AAP report supports.
- Ask the teacher in spring which one or two skills to keep warm. Searches about summer learning loss peak in April and May, which is when most families begin planning.
Families looking for more summer learning activities can also read edCircuit’s summer learning adventures beyond the classroom.
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