SUMMARY:

Pete discusses summer brain drain, the phenomenon of students’ academic abilities slipping over the summer. In order to avoid this, Pete proposed three simple steps. First, preview your fall courses. This way, you can get a head start on the material and familiarize yourself with it. Second, read for pleasure. Doing this can help you stay sharp and practice your reading comprehension skills. Finally, get some math practice. This can help maintain math skills and possibly add new ones. By following these tips, students can avoid the summer brain drain and keep their minds engaged over the summer.

TRANSCRIPT:

0:00:00  You. Hi, everyone. It’s Pete from Achieve Tutorials, and thank you for joining me for some really important tips before summer sweeps you away. But before we get to that, please click that button to subscribe or follow us. Ah, the dog days of summer are nearly upon us, and I’m looking forward to lots of good outdoor time with my family, and I hope you have a lot of fun things planned for this summer as well.

0:00:24  But but. There’s always a but, isn’t there? Students, you need to keep your brain engaged over the summer. Why? Because if you don’t, you’ll backslide three months in math and two months in English on average over the summer. It’s not that you stop advancing, you actually go backward. Even standardized test scores drop significantly over the summer months. So to avoid this summer brain drain, do these three simple things over the summer.

0:00:54  Number one, preview your fall courses. And I can’t stress this one enough we recommend that you do a brief preview of the first few weeks of material you’ll be learning in challenging classes at the beginning of the summer, and then again the last two to three weeks before school starts in the fall. This really sets you up for success in your classes and can instantly create a strong first impression with your teachers. You can do this on your own, or if you need more motivation, you can work with our tutors, who will put together a program just for you. So that’s number one, preview your fall courses. Number two, read a little bit every day.

0:01:30  You don’t need to spend hours a day reading what a luxury that would be. But reading a book for a few minutes a day, every day, maybe right before you go to bed, actually gets you ahead in reading skills over the summer. It doesn’t particularly matter what you read. Pick an author or a genre you like and have at it. Alternately, depending on your grade, you could start working on some test prep Sat or act, focusing on reading comprehension and the English language section. Okay, that’s number two.

0:01:59  Read every day. So, number three, challenge your math mind. You can do this traditionally by, well, doing some math. There are lots of places online where you can take a free course or download worksheets. Khan Academy. Anybody? You could take an in-person math class or work with one of our tutors to catch up or get ahead on academic math or test prep math. Sophomores and juniors, I’m looking at you. Or maybe even set out to learn as many math shortcut tricks as you can over the summer. Send me an email at [email protected]

0:02:30  and I’ll send you a list of a few math tricks and shortcuts to get you started. But you can also keep that math brain engaged by doing numbers-based or logic-based puzzles. A quick Google search for free online logic games yields a ton of results. So that’s it. The third thing, challenge your math brain. So get out there and have some fun this summer. But don’t neglect your brain. Your grades will thank you in the fall. All right, that’s it for now. Have a curious day and I’ll see you next time.

0:02:58  Thank you for listening. And if you haven’t yet, please subscribe to our YouTube channel or follow us on Instagram. And if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us through our website achievetutorials.com.