In the final days of the vacation, after two months of screens, the beach, and entertainment, the feeling is that children's learning ability has weakened a bit. Therefore, this is exactly the time to bring back children's desire to think, concentrate, and learn. In educational psychology terms, this is referred to as summer learning loss – meaning, an average of two to three months of mathematical skills.
Why math, of all things, while the ability to read or write is hardly damaged? This is because during the summer, children continue to read and talk on WhatsApp and screens, hear and see English, and the mechanism remains strong. Math requires an artificial environment, because no child solves exercises on TikTok or PlayStation, and therefore the retrieval mechanism falls asleep due to lack of use. The result – a student who, before the summer, knew how to immediately retrieve that 8*7 is 56 struggles, and an exercise that took them a second before the summer now takes 8–10 seconds.
Such cognitive hesitation and slowness during the first days of school will be interpreted by the child as a lack of talent, which may lead to harm to self-confidence and the development of math anxiety. Ten minutes of short mental retrieval games will restore the retrieval mechanism without opening a single book. It is very important to empower successes and minimize failures so that they will not be afraid to try.
Elementary school: Establishing numerical automation
At elementary school ages, the number sense and flexibility are harmed. Instead of seeing the number 12 as a package composed of 6 times 2, or 20 minus 8, or completion to 100, they just see digits. Therefore, when required to calculate, the brain returns to slow patterns of counting in units (sometimes on fingers) instead of smart and fast retrieval. This delay creates frustration and fear of the subject.
The divisors game
Write the numbers 1–12 on a piece of paper. Each player takes turns choosing a number and accumulates the number of points it represents. If I chose 8, I received 8 points, and the opponent will receive all its divisors: 1, 2, and 4. If they choose 6, I will only receive 3, because 1 and 2 were already taken. Play until the numbers run out. Children discover that it is worthwhile to start with prime numbers: 11, for example, will give the opponent only 1. You can play up to 24, 30, and so on.
Battle of triplets (Fast pattern recognition)
In a regular deck of cards, each player turns over two cards at once. The first player to announce the product or the difference between them wins the cards.
Middle school: Abstract thinking
In middle school, arithmetic becomes abstract algebra (unknowns, exponent rules, functions). The main problem in the summer is the weakening of working memory, which makes it difficult for children to hold several steps of a solution in their heads simultaneously.
Discovering the rule
Choose a secret rule that creates an exercise with one unknown (2X², (X-3), and the like). Children choose numbers and receive the result according to the chosen rule. The goal is to discover what the secret rule is. Along the way, check, for example, if there is a smallest number and what happens when choosing different numbers. The game simulates algebraic thinking and searching for rules. The game assists in algebraic understanding and understanding of functions.
High school (Grades 10–12): 10 seconds back
In high school, the challenge is to identify a strategy for solving complex problems under the time pressure of matriculation exams. In the summer, high schoolers lose the spatial view of numbers and rely blindly on the calculator. Mistakes happen due to a momentary loss of attention. Many of the mistakes stem from incorrect typing in the calculator that continues forward without noticing that the result is not logical.
Therefore, after reaching an answer, perform the "10-second check": Return to the question and look for one thing that can show that the answer is incorrect. For example, is the number possible? Does the result fit the graph or the data? If something does not add up, go back step-by-step until finding where the result began to go wrong (even to the beginning if necessary), correct from there, and continue. And if we did not find a problem, choose one piece of data and check the answer against it.
Such games and tricks help clear the blockages and rewire the fast retrieval pathways in memory. When this mental mechanism returns to working on autopilot, any academic or social challenge will already feel much simpler.
The author is the CEO and founder of Vedicly, an initiative for thinking development