Top Five Reasons Parents Love School Holiday Programs

The school holidays are fast approaching, with weeks and weeks of uninterrupted time to fill. Many parents struggle when it comes time to fill those long hours and longer days. But break times are a great opportunity to help your little learner get the most out of their school year, even when they aren’t in class. Here’s how!

Holiday programs keep essential skills polished and ready for a great start to the new school year. It keeps them engaged and switched on for a love of learning that lasts for life, not just for the school term.

1: Keep the Basics Strong!

Our children pick up a phenomenal number of skills over the course of the school year. They learn everything from complex grammar to long division, all kinds of comprehension skills and a whole suite of essentials like spelling and number skills. It’s important to keep those basics strong.

A short-course holiday program or a once weekly group session will keep those skills from atrophying.

No-one wants to get back into the school year feeling rusty.

Students are given the opportunity to work through material that’s appropriate for their level of expertise – much like how a weightlifter starts light and works their way to heavier loads.

By taking a little time to brush up and stretch out those mental muscles, you’ll be giving your young learner the opportunity to maintain their abilities.

They won’t start the new year desperately trying to remember things they learned two months in the past… or even longer! It’ll all be fresh and ready to go.

2. Learning is for Life

Plenty of us parents enjoyed a bit of lazing about in front of the TV as a child during the dog days of summer. Our children are no different, even if most prefer a more active screen time than endless cartoon repeats. There’s definitely time to relax on the break, and it’s good to take time to unwind.

“…it’s critical we don’t give our kids the message that learning is a chore…”

That said, it’s critical we don’t give our kids the message that learning is a chore, something to be skipped the minute the opportunity presents.

By ensuring there is ongoing room to learn and grow, we tell our children that academic pursuits are their own reward, and not something to be endured. We show them that we value their growth, not just the marks on the end of year report cards.

Our holiday programs also offer skills that are applicable in everyday life. Learning2Learn is explicitly tailored to build strong academic ability across all areas. It teaches how to learn, rather than presenting curriculum material. The holiday break is the perfect time to introduce and solidify these concepts. Each child has a chance to grow overall as a learner.

3. Fill the Gaps

As I mentioned before, our students are expected to learn a huge amount of material in the forty weeks of the school year.

The pace of classroom learning is fast, and there’s often not a lot of time to concentrate on any given child’s specific areas of need. It’s really easy for them to develop gaps in their understanding that may be missed by even the most attentive of teachers.

Holiday tutoring is a great opportunity to address these gaps.

There’s no pressure, no tests or grades.

Group tutoring, like the programs on offer at Seeds of Knowledge, also give students the space they need to breathe. They aren’t under the laser focus of a one-on-one session.

They can pick up what they need in a relaxed atmosphere that prioritises learning for its own sake.

4. Start the New Year Ready

One repeating refrain from our students is how much the holiday programs get them ready for the new year. Six weeks is a long time when you’re in primary school, and some little learners worry about jumping up a grade. Will they like their new teacher? What about their class? Will it be old friends, or new faces? And above all, will the schoolwork itself be harder?

Holiday programs do a lot to ease the transition by providing students with what they need they need to tackle the new school year with confidence.

They don’t have to stretch back a full six weeks to remember their basics, and so are ready to take in new material with ease. And by working in small groups, they keep their social skills polished, too.

They’re ready to get back into the social aspects of learning, because they’ve had a chance to stay in practice over the summer.

This is especially true of our youngest cohort, our pre-prep children. Prep4Prep is explicitly designed to prepare our youngest learners for the classroom. The time they spent in a holiday intensive pays big dividends in confidence once they make it to their first day of school. They know what’s expected and can walk in that door for the first time with their heads high.

5. Locked in and Loving Learning

Of course, the best thing about our holiday programs is that our students love them. We work year after year to refine our programs so they appeal just as much to the children who attend as their parents. After all, they’re the ones coming to spend time with us!

We work in games that re-enforce key lessons, harnessing the power of play to cement important concepts. Our reading material is engaging, our maths made relevant to young minds by involving physical tools that reflect their lives. Hands on activities make abstract ideas and tricky concepts so real they can touch them, and each session finishes with a smile.

They come to love learning for its own sake and not just to pass tests or assignments, and want to come back for more.

That’s a reward that outstrips anything else we can give them.

Building a lifelong love of learning takes work, but it doesn’t need to be grim. It can be joyful and engaging, a real treat instead of a chore.

Holiday programs take the pressure off by removing everyday grind of the classroom. They help our young learners catch up and keep going or just maintain the basic.

And most of all, they love them.

Find out more about our upcoming Holiday Programs.