A Smarter Summer

Summer is the perfect time to explore the possibilities of cognitive training for your child. It offers almost unbelievable advantages to good students, transitioning students, and new students, and can be life changing and life saving for kids who struggle.

Summer: The Perfect Time to Explore The Possibilities of Cognitive Training

Every year parents and students look forward to the temporary relief the summer break provides. Unfortunately, it is only temporary. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the long, lazy days of summer steal up to 25 percent of the previous year's gains from most students. At summer's end, kids go back to school to face new subjects, new assignments, and new tests all over again. Good students go back and have to overcome the phenomenon known as The Summer Slide. In this issue we talk about ways to prevent the summer slide that are a good deal more effective than trips to the library and the museum.

Some students will face the frightening challenge known as transition. I still remember the terror of going from middle school (it was Jr. High in my day) to high school! Of course, there are other transitions, going off to college, and the ultimate transition - starting school for the first time. Kids can actually use this summer to get an edge that will help them sail through any transition with confidence.

Other students - those who struggle - face an even more formidable obstacle upon returning to school. I have spent the past 30 years training such students. The majority of these kids suffer from one or more weak cognitive skills - the underlying mental tools that enable each of us to process new information and learn new things. For them, summer produces much more than a slide; it results in a near complete loss of all the hard-fought gains from the previous year! Here's why:

Kids with underlying skill weaknesses in key areas such as auditory processing or word attack struggle to read, spell, and comprehend...every day. Very often the gains they do experience come at great effort through a series of difficult compensations for those weaknesses. Struggling students often resort to excessive study time and memorization to cling to information before tests, just to get a passing grade. For these kids, summer can lead to an almost total loss of what they gained. If this seems overstated, try giving your child his May history quiz next August and see how much he really learned. Struggling kids literally have to start over every year, and each year of this frustration diminishes their hope, self-esteem, and life-long chance for success.

Imagine the advantage cognitive skills training could be for your child this summer. If the possibilities intrigue you, call one of our LearningRx centers near you. You will be amazed how one summer can be so valuable.

Dr. Ken Gibson
Founder and President of LearningRx, Inc.