School’s Almost Out! (But That Doesn’t Mean Learning Stops!)

Time really does fly and summer is almost upon us! There is a lot we look forward to during the summer months; the beautiful, sunny Santa Barbara weather for example. Students especially look forward to summer break and time off of school, which comes with its own set of tricky difficulties to navigate. For parents who are still working regular schedules, it can be difficult to find people to watch and take care of their children all day long when they are out of school. Additionally, learning attrition is an easy pattern for students to fall into over the 2.5 months away from school. Learning attrition is essentially the setback or loss of memory or progress in academics that occurs over long periods of time spent away from school. When children are not actively engaging their brains in an academic manner to maintain the knowledge and skills they have learned up to that point, they usually experience a regression in memory and knowledge of facts and skills. Children in elementary/middle school ages are especially prone to this. Learning in these stages of development is not like riding a bike where once you learn, you can never forget. The mindset of learning has to be maintained in order to retain knowledge and skills and continue building upon them.

Fortunately, at our Community Learning Centers (CLCs) we are aware of this problem and have done our best to retaliate. For 8 weeks of summer break, our CLCs offer specialized innovative programming designed to engage students, encourage, and maintain that learning mindset, combat learning attrition, provide care for students whose parents are working, and offer students new learning experiences that don’t happen inside the classroom! We encourage those students who can read to continue doing so in order to keep up the skill and hopefully learn to find joy in the practice! The more popular activities we do though are often the field trips! We take our students to the beach, on exciting nature walks to the zoo, to different museums around Santa Barbara, and we’ve even visited the botanic gardens! It is important for students to know that learning can be fun, and that it can (and often does) happen outside of the classroom! Taking students on these field trips also gives them the opportunity to recall the knowledge they learn in school to engage with the environments we bring them to, whether that means being able to properly identify a plant at the botanical gardens or recall a fun fact about different animals we see at the zoo! These tactics all work together to help engage their memory and prevent learning attrition. 

We are so encouraged to see the growth of our students over their summer breaks because of our programming! Not only do our students retain their previously acquired knowledge, but they enjoy their breaks even more deeply and return to school refreshed and ready to tackle the new year of learning! Visit our website to learn more about our CLCs and how we serve our students and community!