Summer Brain Fitness: 5 Tips To Keep Your Brain Sharp This Summer

For most families, summer means a break from their usual schedules to spend time outside, grill with friends, and head out on family vacations.

But it’s also important to find ways to keep your child’s mind sharp and engaged throughout the summer to avoid the “summer slide” (the learning loss many kids experience over the summer). 

In fact, during summer break, students can lose as much as 20-27 percent of the reading and math skills they gained during the previous school year! What’s more, these learning losses accumulate, resulting in even greater levels of loss over time.

Engaging the brain with variety and curiosity helps boost brain health and retain what has been learned. The following are a few ways you can help your child maintain and strengthen their brain fitness this summer.

1. Read Daily

If you only incorporate one educational thing into your summer schedule, let it be daily reading. Reading a little every day is one of the best ways to maintain brain fitness. 

Reading strengthens existing neural pathways while creating new ones, and your brain gets a workout by using the imagination, sparking new ideas, and making connections between the story and everyday life.

Make time for daily reading for both your child and yourself (modeling reading for fun is a great way to encourage kids to read more!). In addition, consider implementing some of the following into your weekly schedule to further encourage reading:

• Work with your child to create a summer reading list. Set a goal and plan a way to celebrate reaching that goal—a pizza party or trip to their favorite ice cream shop, for example.
• Take regular trips to your local library and let your kids pick out new books to read. They’ll be more likely to want to read if they get to choose books themselves. 
• Find a new book series your child can get excited about, so they have plenty of books on deck to read.
• Attend story time at your local library.
• Pack books for family vacations.
• Read out loud to your kids, even if they can read on their own.
• Change it up—branch out from usual reading topics or genres and try something new to challenge your child’s brain even more.
• Have “reading picnics” in your local park: pack a lunch or snack, and walk or bike to a nearby park or beach with books to read together.

2. Take Time Off From Screens

As a family, take a tech vacation from time to time throughout the summer. 

Whether you do it several days at once or take shorter breaks each week, taking time away from screens helps refresh your brain’s synapses. Plus, it frees up your time for other healthy and fun activities, like reading, exercising, and playing games.

Turn phones, laptops, tablets, TVs, and other screens off, and use that time to:

• Learn a new skill
• Cook a meal or bake a treat
• Visit a local museum
• Play a game
• Go for a nature walk
• Read a book
• Listen to music and have a dance party
• Play a sport
• Go to the beach or park
• Write letters to friends and family
• Tell stories around the dinner table or a bonfire
• Go camping

In addition, consider making bedrooms a screen-free zone all of the time. Doing so will help you and your children have better sleep and improve cognitive function and communication skills.

3. Get Regular Exercise

Physical exercise doesn’t only improve your physical fitness…it also boosts your brain fitness! Exercise increases fuel delivery to the brain, strengthens the connections between nerve cells, and decreases the harmful effects of stress. In addition, exercise helps your brain build new muscle skills, learn to estimate distance, and practice balance.

Make exercise fun by including a variety of exercises to challenge your child’s brain: 

• Play tag
• Jump rope
• Draw a hopscotch board on the sidewalk and play together
• Set up an obstacle course or relay race
• Go for a family bike ride, jog, or nature walk
• Sign up for a weekly class, such as yoga, aerobics, karate, kickboxing, or swimming
• Toss or kick a ball in the yard
• Set up a basketball hoop and play HORSE
• Bike to the park, beach, or your favorite ice cream spot

Whatever you do, find something your kids can enjoy (and that you can enjoy with them!). If exercise is fun, they’ll be more likely to stick with it.

4. Meditate

Meditation is one of the best things you can do for your mental and physical health. Not only is it relaxing, but it also gives your brain a workout, engaging it in new, interesting ways. Meditation teaches your brain to focus on the present moment and be mindful of what’s happening now, rather than thinking through to-do lists or reliving past events. 

Practice meditation regularly with your child, taking a moment each day to meditate. You don’t need to spend a lot of time on this activity—even 5-10 minutes a day can work wonders for your brain health.

If your child finds it difficult to sit still, start with very short meditations (1-2 minutes), or try a walking meditation. You don’t need any special equipment, just a quiet place to sit, close your eyes, and focus on your breath. If you want more direction, there are many apps available to get you started, such as Headspace.

5. Challenge Your Brain With Games and Brain Training

Brain games and exercises help keep your brain strong in the same way that physical exercise keeps your body strong. Brain games can help you improve problem solving skills, discover patterns, and prevent cognitive decline. They can also improve memory, focus, and mood.

Give your child’s brain new, complex activities to work on with games like Sudoku, crossword puzzles, or memory games. Or try making up stories, playing 20 questions, writing poems, or counting by 2’s, 3’s, or 4’s while going up or down stairs or jumping rope. As with meditation, it takes only minutes per day for challenging games to have an effect on your brain fitness.

In addition to playing these games at home, consider enrolling your child in brain training with LearningRx. 

Brain training helps build the brain’s learning and thinking skills. It targets and strengthens the brain’s core cognitive skills like memory, attention span, and reasoning, as well as the fundamental skills behind activities like reading, writing, and math. By strengthening these skills, a brain training program can help your child:

• Learn more easily
• Think more quickly
• Overcome learning difficulties, and
• Unlock hidden potential

To learn more and get started with LearningRx brain training programs, contact us today!