3 Fun Math Activities to Beat the Summer Slide

The summer season is just around the corner! But even though your students (and you!) have a break from school, you can still encourage them to engage their mathematical brains.

Summer learning loss, also known as summer slide, is real. When many students return to school, they can be a little rusty with concepts they learned the previous year. You’ve probably experienced this in your classroom, as I did when I taught.

Fortunately, there are ways to help. For example, try these 3 fun activities and math games to keep young math minds engaged all summer long.

You can help students and families devote time to practicing math skills each day. Give them open-ended math tasks in a calendar format. We created a free Problem of the Day calendar that you can download.

Have students pick and choose activities from the daily calendar to complete during their summer vacation. They can do these tasks outside or with items around their home. They may not even realize they’re doing math!

One of my favorite problems from the calendar you can see in the photo above. Students measure their shadows at 3 different times throughout the day. Then they can use their results to determine if there is a relationship between shadow length and time of day.

When I was elementary school teacher, my students loved math games! And a deck of cards was an inexpensive and easy resource to use. With a partner, kids can play math card games to help reinforce skills like multiplication, place value, and subtraction.

Newark City Schools in Ohio has a great list of math games with directions and visuals you can use with a deck of cards. Or try these ideas for math games from Scholastic blogger Nancy Jang.

As with other subjects, journaling is a great tool to encourage students to reflect on their mathematical learning and deepen their understanding. Have students write about mathematical observations in their math journal once a day or once a week. They can write, draw, or take a picture of what inspired them to think about math.

Some example observations might include a picture of a symmetrical leaf, a grocery list with estimated costs, or a drawing of the shapes in a soccer ball. Remind children to look at the world through a mathematical lens and ask the questions: What do I observe? What do I wonder? What math do I see?