Keeping Kids Learning Over The Summer: Fun ways To Avoid The Summer Slide

Read Every Day, in Any Language

Reading is the single most effective thing a child can do over the summer. That includes novels, comics, graphic novels, magazines – anything that pulls your child in and keeps them turning pages.

For children in bilingual or international schools, reading in both languages is critical. If your child reads in English at school, spend a few minutes each day with a French book or magazine as well. Over weeks, this small effort pays off with big improvements in fluency and vocabulary.

Libraries in Lausanne and across the Vaud region offer a variety of free summer activities for children, from storytelling sessions and creative workshops to outdoor reading spaces and books brought into local neighbourhoods. Often social and playfully themed, these initiatives help make reading feel like an adventure rather than a duty.

Cook Together and Make it Mathematical

Cooking is full of real mathematics. Weighing ingredients, doubling or halving a recipe, calculating timings, reading temperatures – these tasks all develop the kind of applied number skills that primary and secondary teachers value enormously.

Let your child take the lead on a dish they want to make. Give them the recipe and the responsibility. The learning happens naturally, growing along with a sense of pride when your child sees the results.

Explore the World Around You

The Lausanne area in summer is an extraordinary classroom. A walk up to Mont Pèlerin prompts questions about geology, climate and weather. A visit to the Olympic Museum opens conversations about history, geography and global sport. A ferry to Evian or Chillon Castle is a history lesson with better views than any classroom can offer.

Children learn through conversation, not just content. Ask questions while accompanying your child. What do you think this building was used for? Why do the grapes grow on that slope and not this one? You do not need to know the answers. Asking interesting questions and pursuing the answers together is part of the learning.

Use technology purposefully

Screens are not the enemy of learning over summer. They are simply tools, and what matters is what children do with them. A child who spends an afternoon following a coding tutorial, building a game, editing a short film or learning to use a design programme is developing real skills.

Set some boundaries around passive consumption and encourage active creation instead. The key is helping your child find a specific goal that motivates them.

Keep Language Skills Sharp

For families living in the Lausanne area, summer is a great time to build real-world language confidence. Shopping at a French-speaking market, ordering at a café, chatting with a neighbour: these small moments of human communication do more for oral fluency than most formal language exercises.

If your child is learning English as a second language, watching English-language films and series with subtitles in the original language is an effective strategy. The combination of audio and visual reinforcement builds listening comprehension while keeping your child interested and engaged with the language.

Give children Time to Be Bored

This might seem like the opposite of keeping children learning, but boredom is one of the most productive states a child can be in. When there is nothing to do, children invent things to do. They build, draw, write, construct, imagine. This kind of unstructured creative play develops the problem-solving and self-directed thinking that schools and universities value.

Prepare for the New School Year Without Making it Feel Like School

Our back to school checklist for Switzerland delivers a practical guide on getting your family ready before the new term begins.

If you are thinking about the next school year and want to find out more about Collège Champittet, our bilingual programmes or our holiday clubs, get in touch with our admissions team.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the summer slide?
The summer slide refers to the learning loss that can occur during long school holidays when children step entirely away from reading, problem-solving and language practice. Most teachers notice the effect after the holidays, and it typically takes children a few weeks to recover.

How much time should children spend learning over the summer?
There is no fixed rule, but even thirty minutes of reading or purposeful activity each day makes a measurable difference over six weeks. The aim is to keep minds active, not to replicate a school day.

Do bilingual children need to practise both languages over summer?
Yes, and it does not need to be formal. Reading in both languages, watching films and having conversations in each language is enough to maintain the fluency children have built during the school year.