The Benefit of Summer Enrichment Sessions

While many students and families choose to take a well-deserved break following the exhaustion of a long school year, others decide that they’d like to continue tutoring sessions throughout the summer for enrichment purposes. For those who might ask, “What are the benefits of summer enrichment sessions?” the following is a list of reasons some continue tutoring throughout the summer:

Review of the previous year’s key concepts: With fewer obligations, assignments and responsibilities between school years, the summer is the perfect time for students to revisit important and challenging topics and units of study covered during the school year. Summer tutoring offers students a chance to focus on both fundamentals and tricky skills and concepts in order to solidify students’ understanding and gain confidence through additional exposure and practice.

Strengthen students’ foundation on which to build the following year: From school year to school year, students build on their knowledge and skills across subjects. Remaining in the practice of exercising basic and foundational skills, such as reading, discussing and writing, or applying basic number operations to realistic problem-solving situations helps students to maintain and strengthen the skills they have developed throughout their academic careers, and positions them for increased confidence and success as they begin the following school year. Whether parents are looking for a tutor for reading or a tutor for math, summer can be a great place to start.

Preview important topics for the upcoming school year/get a “head start”: Summer tutoring also offers students a chance to preview important and potentially challenging topics they can expect to encounter in their next school year. This helps them to prepare, and allows them an opportunity to seek and receive individual support, customized to their specific strengths, questions and challenges. In previewing the upcoming school year’s most important topics in a scenario that allows for small-group or individual support, students feel more prepared to persevere and problem solve when confronted with these topics during the school year. This practice affords students the ability to dedicate time and effort to their assignments and responsibilities across subjects during the school year, and consequently results in greater overall success, as the attention given to crucial and challenging topics, such as essay-writing or geometry, during the summer reduces their struggle throughout the academic year.

Prevent the “Summer Slide”: Many parents and teachers discuss and express concern over the “summer slide”: the notion that several weeks without practicing and applying the concepts and skills developed throughout the school year can in fact result not only in lack of progression, but in regression. Summer enrichment sessions help to prevent the summer slide, as they offer students a chance to reinforce the fluency they have developed across subjects. Continuing to exercise and apply the skills they have mastered during the school year throughout the summer results in greater success for students when they return to school. Specifically, students who maintain a consistent routine to allow for practice and reinforcement of fundamental skills are better equipped as they are presented with increasingly complex procedures and tasks each academic year, all of which derive from the basic facts and foundational learning skills on which they continuously build.