This Is Your Brain on Summertime

Several years ago, there was an anti-drug commercial "Fried Eggs" that featured a frying pan with sizzling butter and an egg. The tag line stated, "This is drugs. This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs." Although summertime is not a drug, the effects on the brain might be similar. "This is summertime. (Imagine your kids for hour upon hour playing Guitar Hero, watching reruns of the Brady Bunch and networking on MySpace.) This is your brain. (Hour upon hour of classroom instruction and homework from kindergarten through 12th grade locked in an inaccessible compartment of the brain.) This is your brain on summertime." Get the picture?

Research from the Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University illustrates the following:

• All young people experience learning losses when they do not engage in educational activities during the summer.


• On average, students lose approximately 2.6 months of grade level equivalency in mathematical computation skills over the summer months.


• Children from low-income families lose over 2 months of reading achievement during the summer. Children from higher-income families make slight gains in reading achievement during the summer.


• Children's health habits are less healthy during the summer.


• Out-of-school time is a dangerous time for unsupervised children and teens. They are more likely to use alcohol, drugs and tobacco; engage in criminal and other high-risk behaviors; receive poor grades; and drop out of school than those who have the opportunity to benefit from constructive activities supervised by responsible adults.

So how can we stop the summer brain leak and help our students grow some brain cells?

1. Limit television, video games and computer time. A 1999 media study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, Kids & Media @ The New Millennium, indicates that all kids, ages 2-18, spend an average of 5:29 hours using media, including television, computers, video games and music. Track your family's media use for a day or two and then discuss it in a family council. Let your children make recommendations for the better use of media, selecting better quality media and spending less time with media. If they help develop the plan, it is more likely they will follow the plan with less nagging and frustration on your part.

2. Incorporate learning activities into your summertime plans. For example,

• My friend Lori would select a different Shakespearean play to study each summer. As a family, they would read it, watch it and act it out. At first there were many moans of complaint and protest, but after the first couple of years, the kids were asking what play they would study and actually looked forward to it.


• Another friend, Wendy, remembers that her mother posted three new vocabulary words on the refrigerator each day and at dinnertime Wendy was expected to spell and use the new words correctly in a sentence.


• Join the summer reading program at your local library or bookstore.


• Plan your summer vacation or a portion of it with an educational focus. Visit a historical site or museum. Keep a journal of the vacation with drawings, photos, entries and a list of "Things We Learned." Play alphabet games and sing songs as you travel.


• Purchase old textbooks from your local school and let your kids teach each other, the neighbor kids, and even you. When I was in 3rd grade, I made my parents attend the local school book sale and buy me a student and teacher edition of math, reading and history books and then I made my younger siblings play school all summer. Both of my sisters are better in math than I am because I made them solve the problems but I checked their work using the answers in the teacher's edition!


• Get some physical exercise every day. I usually go to the gym in the morning, but occasionally I exercise to a tape at home. My daughter loves to exercise with mommy and recently reminded me that it had been a long time since we had exercised together. Go outside-hike a trail, play tag, go for a bike ride, go swimming.


• Incorporate math into everyday activities. Make cookies and change the recipe to teach fractions-triple the recipe or cut it in half. Keep a notebook and pencil in your purse and in the car and practice addition, subtraction, multiplication tables and division. Build something together and teach (or in my case-learn) geometry.


• Enroll in local summer classes. Public schools and universities have extension programs with amazing summer courses for fun or academic credit.

This is summertime. This is your brain. This is your brain on summertime. New picture!