By: Ashmar Mandou

It may be challenging to keep your children proactive this summer, but we’ve compiled a list of tips to help parents keep their children motivated this summer season.

• Summer reading is essential for students to maintain and continue building their reading skills. This summer, assign books that aren’t simply homework-based, but will make the child think on a much larger level.

• Encourage students to start keeping a journal to regularly document their activities throughout the summer. Give guidelines about what they can think about or consider writing about, and build in the potential for them to use this journal to write a summary at the start of the new school year.

• Provide parents with information for educational camps and structured social activities that parents can participate in with their children. Encourage parents to take part in these activities wherever possible to make it more fun for children and make it feel less like “homework.”

• Capitalize on “screen time.” Challenge students to teach their parents about what they’ve learned from time spent on videos, podcasts and social media accounts.

• Create a “matching agreement.” For every hour spent in front of a screen entertaining themselves by playing video games or watching Netflix, have your child match that time with time spent on a learning activity. There are a multitude of educational online options varying from math games to improving key-boarding skills that work great for this purpose.

• Set “learning self-improvement goals” such as a number of books read, minutes of math tutorials a day, or pages written. Then agree on a fun reward for goals attained.