Like many parents, when I road-trip with my children, I keep a bag of stashed activities, games, books and puzzles that I pull out to allay boredom when the kids start asking too often, “Are we there yet?!” Sometimes the activities are meant purely for entertainment, but more often than not, I try to throw in some educational ones, too.
The Summer Bridge Activities workbooks from Carson Dellosa Publishing fall decidedly into the “learning category,” of travel activities for kids. Children may not find them as fun as making friendship bracelets or playing travel bingo in the backseat, but this mom thinks they are brilliant to help kids learning during a three-month-long summer break.
Each book, which is 160 pages long, is geared to “bridge” the gap between school grades. They are designed for kids from preschool to eighth grade, to help them maintain the skills they have learned in the previous year, and help them prep for the following school year. Generally, kids complete two activity pages a day, which might take them 15 minutes. Activities cover a range of subjects, including reading, writing and math (for my 8-year-old, that’s addition and subtraction; for my 10-year-old it’s multiplication, fractions and geometry).
Bottom line: I absolutely love these books. I volunteer at my kids’ school a lot, and time and time again, I hear from teachers and administrators that children truly lose some of the strides they’ve made in learning when they don’t keep their brains active in the summer months. Reading books from the public library is great; but reviewing important academic standards — even just a few minutes a day — is so key.
My kids don’t rush to complete their daily workbook pages right after breakfast, and they’ve negotiated with me not to do any pages on the weekends. But once they get started with their weekday “work,” they have fun with it. Favorite pages have included word searches, reading maps and charts and fixing misspelled words. Both kids are good at math, so they whip through “worksheet” pages that contain rows of problems.
Books are priced at $14.95, and can be found in bookstores or on Amazon.com ($13.95). If your child only needs to work on reading or math, you can purchase these single-subject workbooks; they retail for $8.95.
