7 Ways to Reinforce Executive Functioning Skills this Summer

As the final school bells ring and the summer heat kicks in, many families are gearing up to enjoy a summer break filled with quality time, relaxation, and planned activities. Before school ends, many teachers give tips, tricks, and resources to avoid the “summer learning slide”, referring to a student’s loss of reading and math skills during the summer months. While these resources often include practice pages and suggestions to maintain academic progress, it is equally important for students to exercise the executive functioning skills they frequently practiced through school systems, structures, and routines. Here are 7 ways these skills can be easily incorporated into your student’s summer break through a combination of day-to-day routines and fun, engaging activities.

Get organizeD

During the summer months, many families experience less structure in their daily schedules and may fill their time with non-routine events such as camping, vacations, playdates, summer camps, and more. This transition can be challenging for students who may have relied on visual supports or daily routines during school. You can support this transition at home by using organization/planning tools to keep track of important dates and information, setting timers as needed to display how much time your child has left to complete a task, and helping your child create morning/afternoon checklists to stay organized and keep track of any routinely scheduled tasks that need to be completed.

Be mindful

Another way to practice executive functioning skills is through daily mindfulness exercises. Angela Pruess, a licensed clinical family therapist, highlights eight benefits and examples of mindfulness for children. Practicing mindfulness can look like daily meditation, “down time” or “quiet time”, yoga, nature walks, spending time outdoors, mindfulness apps, blowing bubbles, coloring, journaling, and listening to music.

Play, play, play

Playing games is a great way to practice skills like planning, memory, self-regulation, flexibility, self-control, organization, and goal setting. Specific games like Monopoly, Uno, Bingo, Connect 4, Jenga, Mancala, Memory, Battleship, and Guess Who can work on these skills. Prepped Learning offers additional suggestions for games to improve executive functions. Not only are games a great way to improve critical thinking skills, but they are also a fun way to make connections and create memories with your child.

Create a summer activity wish list

Have your child create a summer “wish list” of realistic activities and goals for this summer. Goals can range from “read 10 books” to “see a new movie”. Then, encourage your child to plan out and set a timeline to accomplish each task. You can add this to your family organizational system or create a personal calendar with your child so they can view and self-assess their progress.

Join an organized sport or activity group

Your child could join a summer camp, team, or program to increase their team building and executive functioning skills. Many sports and activity groups (band, music, theater, martial arts, etc.) help children develop skills such as organization, self-awareness, self-regulation, attention, memory, vision, and goal setting.

Run a lemonade stand

Your child can plan an activity with friends, family, or independently to run a lemonade stand. They can create a list of materials, set goals of how much lemonade to sell, practice following multi-step directions while making the lemonade, organize their stand, modify plans as needed, and improve task initiation skills. This can also give an opportunity for children to reflect, using developing their metacognitive skills, and problem solve for any necessary improvements.

Create checklists for planned activity days

If you have an activity planned, such as a beach day, vacation, camping trip, etc., you can ask your child to get involved in the planning process by creating a checklist of necessary items to pack. Not only does this checklist help create responsibility, but it also works to improve skills like planning, organization, and prioritization.

Whether your summer has a jam-packed schedule, or is filled with rest and relaxation, there are many fun, and exciting ways your child can continue to develop their executive functions and prevent the summer slide!

Written by Ami Z.

Supporting Children as They Develop a Sense of Self

As humans, our sense of self is integral to most every aspect of our life. Identity can be formed from a variety of factors, including hobbies, personality traits, occupation, spiritual beliefs and more. As opposed to their youngest years of life, children entering elementary school and beyond begin to develop their unique sense of self in a more meaningful and abstract manner. Integrating projects, enrichment activities, discussion, reflection, and hobbies can all benefit children in the development of their identity and their ability to express themselves.

Choice Projects

Project-based learning is ideal for the development of a positive sense of self because it promotes intrinsic motivation, curiosity, questioning, reflection and child-led task initiation. Projects might be child-led, teacher assigned, or created by a family member! If assigned a project for school, children can find small ways to tailor the project to fit their interests. For example, they can find a topic that speaks to them, or choose a manner to present their project that excites them. Perhaps they are a visual learner and want to hand-draw every picture in their presentation, or they love making movies and choose to do their presentation video style! With summer coming up, this is a great time for parents to encourage their children to pick a project of their own to work on over the next couple of months. Self-directed projects offer a full creative outlet for children to work within, all while learning more about themselves and what makes them who they are. Long term self-choice projects appropriate for the summer might include: learning how to build and maintain a garden bed, writing a book or comic book, creating a dance routine or talent show, doing a research project on a place they want to travel, or building their own robot! The options here are endless, with an end-goal of finding something that encourages the joy of discovery and is as self-led as possible.

Enrichment Activities

Enrichment activities, or extracurriculars, play a huge role in building a child’s sense of identity. Parents may offer guidance and support in the process of exploring which activities speak most to their children. Extracurriculars can often become overwhelming and sometimes, not so child-led. It is beneficial to really observe children’s interests and help them to choose activities outside of school that are going to spark joy and help them grow as individuals. After all, children end up spending MANY hours doing these activities, so it’s important to pick ones that they find interesting. Take inventory of what hobbies are already most enjoyable to the child and align those with a club, camp, or class. Nowadays, there are an array of options to choose from, like music, sports, cooking, yoga, dance, theater and STEM. It may be helpful to allow children the space to practice a few of these enrichment activities in order to then be able to narrow down their favorites!

ReflectioN

As children grow and advance throughout elementary school, so too does their sense of self and identity. The end of the school year provides a great opportunity for kids to reflect upon goals, achievements, growth and personal interests. Here are some ideas that may jumpstart this process. Students can put together a portfolio of all of their favorite projects, art pieces, writing samples and other accomplishments. They can share this with friends and family and talk through the “why” behind their choices. To reflect on their best memories from outside of school, encourage children to create a “top 10” list of the ten most memorable, funny, interesting or unique things that happened to them over the year. This can become a scrapbook of sorts if they tie in a small writing and add photographs or illustrations to go along with each item on their list. This type of self-examination will ultimately help children to better evaluate their strengths, passions and gifts!

A strong, and positive sense of self is helpful in every arena of life down the road. Understanding one’s own core beliefs and identity benefits the ability to set boundaries, achieve goals, develop and maintain relationships and so much more. Finding ways to weave in self-exploration throughout the school-aged years, ultimately fosters and nurtures the confidence and pride a child has with their own identity.

Written by Laine J.