Summer’s here! Time to…hit the books?

Summertime lessons with an in-home tutor can be the key to a child’s success in the next school year. While many children can’t wait for school to end and summer to start, come early July kids often find themselves wishing for something to do. Indeed, the season can be a time of boredom, filled with long hours of unimaginative video game playing and television watching. This lapse in learning can have a measurable negative impact on students’ mental capacity:

• One research study conducted by Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Summer Learning showed that children typically score lower on standardized tests at the end of summer vacation than they did on the same tests taken at the beginning of summer vacation.
• Another study claims that, on average, students have typically lost 2.6 months of grade-level equivalency in mathematical computation skills by the time they return to school in August or September.

Many school districts offer their own summer programs to combat such slumps. In a tough economy, though, parents can’t count on the government for too much help. Local and state budgets are stretched so much that they can barely fund remedial programs, meaning that students who once depended on summer school for enrichment classes may find themselves out of luck. Recharging kids’ brains This scarcity of school-run programs has led parents to consider alternative ways of keeping their kids intellectually stimulated, such as in-home tutoring. Unlike traditional learning centers, which can be located inconveniently far away, in-home tutoring services such as ours send qualified instructors to your house. Tutoring sessions are conducted one-on-one, wherever your child normally does homework. Cari Diaz, Franchise Director here at Club Z! Tutoring, says that when it comes to summer learning, in-home instruction simply has better results. “When studying at home, as opposed to a learning center, students are more eager to learn and tend to pay more attention.” Summer tutoring with an in-home tutor should:

• Rebuild self-esteem that may have been battered by bad grades during the previous school year.
• Close the achievement gap by helping students catch up and get ahead before the start of the new school year.
• Prepare high school students with the strategies, skills and confidence to take upcoming SAT and ACT tests.
• Reinforce skills for children with learning disabilities, who might otherwise lose skills during a 2-3 month separation from formal learning.
• Provide money-saving enrichment and accelerated learning opportunities outside of traditional daycare.
• Enable students to master benchmarks necessary for passing state reading, writing and math standardized tests.
• Allow kids to explore and develop the skill areas they find interesting, such as art, music and foreign languages

Whether you’re worried about your child’s grades, or just tired of watching your kid turn into a TV-worshiping zombie each summer, strongly consider summertime tutoring. At first, your son or daughter may balk at the idea of summer study, but try to get them excited about their own academic potential. Once they get their first-quarter grades in October, they’ll be thanking you!