Every teacher knows the symptom. Term starts, and a child who could read cat is back to sounding it out from scratch. The summer slide is well documented in the research, and the skills that vanish fastest are the newest and least settled ones. For children in the early primary years, English is exactly that kind of skill. The good news is that holding on to what's there takes far less effort than learning it again. Fifteen minutes a day will do it.
The holiday principle: maintain, don't race ahead
The mistake well meaning families make is using the holiday to cram next term's content. The child gets worn out, learns to dislike the subject, and then sits bored in class because it's all revision. The right target is much smaller: keep the existing skills in regular use. A little reading, a little writing, some listening every day. You're watering a plant, not planting a forest.
A menu of activities to rotate so nobody gets bored
- Monday, Wednesday, Friday: one revision worksheet a day and no more. Pick topics from last term, so the main feeling is that this is easy.
- Tuesday and Thursday: 20 minutes of English cartoons or songs, then ask your child one question: which words did you recognise?
- Saturday: a mission outside the house. Find English signs at the mall or in a shop and photograph them or copy them down to show you. EXIT, SALE, OPEN. Thailand is full of free teachers.
- Sunday: nothing at all. Anything worth doing needs a day off.
The last week before term starts
Now turn the dial up a little. Get out last term's vocabulary notebook and go through it together, letting your child sort the words into two piles, the ones they still remember and the ones they've forgotten. That sorting is revision of the best kind. Your child then walks into the classroom on the first day feeling that everything they had is still in their hands, and that confidence is worth more than any amount of getting ahead.