Author: Rebecca Manari | April 28th, 2022
Summer holidays are always a very exciting time for children. Some of our kids have busy summers going to summer classes or taking dance or swimming lessons, while some just chill at home. Some go on family vacations to really great locations, within the country or abroad. Wherever or whatever your kids are doing, the holidays should be fun!
Summer holidays can be a huge relief and give respite to a child with special needs and children with a specific learning disability who often go through a lot of stress and academic pressure at school. Taking a much-needed break from studies and difficult textbooks is always great for any child’s emotional well being too. However, when a child has specific disabilities in the classroom, that long break during the summer holidays may mean that the child has another struggle with getting back to the grind, learning routines, and study habits once school begins again.
There are things one can definitely do during those long summer holidays, in order to reduce some of their struggles at school once they get back.
Use the extra time to build skills and boost your child’s confidence: If your child is struggling in a particular area that they’d like to improve upon, work subliminally on that skill for the 4-6 weeks that your child is away from school. This is also a good opportunity to approach the same skills minus the pressure and time constraints, allowing your child to approach the tasks with a very different attitude. If done right, the return to school in the new academic year is with a fresh slate equipped with so much more confidence, developed and new skills, and a positive attitude to learning. It’s important to limit time spent and it definitely should not be labelled ‘homework or study! Think counting games for maths, spelling games for English, creative arts for broadening vocabulary, and letting imaginations fly. If there is homework to be done try to limit work to a set agreed time to not rob the child of their vacation-relaxation time.
Revisit the tasks that your child finds the most stress-inducing, but do it gently, with a completely different approach. Let’s take, for example, a child who hates writing work and has extreme stress when faced with a pencil and paper. What we can do to overcome the stress, is to gently introduce games that involve a pencil. As kids, we used to play games all the time in our notebooks. Noughts and crosses is a favourite game that everyone knows. But first try it with chalk, in scattered flour on a work surface, in the sand, in mud in the garden, with paints…anything that makes a mark and makes it fun – not sitting at a desk worrying about if the lines are straight or the noughts are beautiful circles – have FUN! Strengthening the fingers and hands and improving the eye-hand co-ordination will help with writing skills in the classroom. Dots and squares is another game, where we write our initial every time we closed a square. For a child with spelling challenges, H-A-N-G-M-A-N is a wonderful game to play. Some children who can manage spelling out many words may enjoy the good old game Name-Place-Animal-Thing. The idea is to get the practice in without the child even realising!
Having an enjoyable activity can always turn the pencil from an enemy to a friend, something that’s anxiety-inducing, turning it into a fun tool that helps your child play with you and enjoy a game.
Hope you will try these tips and let us know in the comments what surfaces and tools worked for you!