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Practicing English is a thing that ideally needs to be kept up with regularly, and when school breaks up for the holidays, it's easy for what’s been learnt to be forgotten. This phenomenon is called summer learning loss, and it’s something that affects students of every age and stage.

So, how can you encourage your students or children to keep practicing their language skills over the holidays? There are apps and online activities –but the school holidays are a good opportunity for young learners to disconnect and enjoy some time offline. So here are some activities to suggest to them. There are no screens in sight, and the whole family can enjoy practicing English together:

Go on a nature walk

Get them out into the fresh air with nature spotting. Make a list of things for your students/children to find in their garden or local park. You can keep the list simple for younger learners, with things like trees, grass or flowers, linking them to colors or numbers. For older learners, you can make the search a bit more challenging by including specific species of tree, flower or insect.

This offline activity reinforces the links between English and the natural world. It helps to build children’s observational skills and builds their natural vocabulary along with their gross motor skills. What’s more, have shown that spending time in nature is enormously beneficial for children, restoring their attention, reducing their stress and helping them to become more creative and engaged in learning.

Follow a recipe

For this activity, choose a recipe that you think your students/children will enjoy making.

Cakes or cookies are popular choices – most young learners have a sweet tooth! Then, with their parents or caregiver, they can make a shopping list of the ingredients they need, buy them from the supermarket, and then follow the recipe steps.

This type of offline activity helps young learners use their English in a practical way. It will develop their vocabulary and link their English language skills to other skills like math and science. Following a recipe from start to finish teaches children how to follow instructions and problem solve. It also builds their fine motor skills as they pour, stir and chop. They’ll get a considerable boost to their confidence when they take their cake out of the oven – and they’ll be able to share that success with their family and friends. After all, nearly everyone likes cake!

Read a story

Reading has numerous benefits for children (and adults too). It is good for building vocabulary, developing creativity and promoting empathy. What’s more, reading has been shown to . It’s the perfect antidote to too much screen time and a good way for learners to maintain their English level over the holidays. But it’s essential to ensure the text's level is correct. If it’s too difficult, they will be frustrated and put off. It’s crucial for reading to be enjoyable!

Older learners can read independently, but you can also suggest some books to read with parents/caregivers. Reading aloud together is a really positive way for adults and children to spend time together. It positively impacts children’s self-esteem and builds good associations with reading, hopefully encouraging them to become independent readers.

Learn how to read a map

This activity involves a little bit of preparation– but it’s a fun activity and gets children outdoors and away from screens! Open up local maps, and have children select somewhere they’d like to visit. Then, they can create a navigation guide in English, building on their vocabulary of directions and surroundings to describe the route.

Learning how to read a map and follow directions is an excellent cognitive and physical exercise. It helps young learners to solve problems and builds their decision-making and observational skills.

Do some experiments

Suggest some DIY science experiments to do at home. Just like the recipe challenge, learners will need to make a list of the materials they’ll need and gather all the experiment components before setting everything up. Then, they will follow the instructions in English and see how their experiments turn out!

Science experiments are a great way to nurture children’s intellectual curiosity and develop critical thinking skills. It also encourages learners to solve problems and analyze results. Who knows, you could even be planting the seed of a STEM career in future years!

Elevator to the future: English skills

“Would it be safer to take the stairs?”

The question came to mind in Montreal last week when I visited a 1929 apartment building and came face-to-face with its equally ancient caged elevator. An elderly woman shooed me inside the polished brass and oak confection and, as we ascended, confided that there was still an elevator operator when she first moved into the building.

Ah, an elevator operator – it’s a career and skill set we’ve almost forgotten. But just as hard as it is for us to imagine doing a job that only involves opening and closing doors and pressing buttons, an elevator operator from 50 years ago would find it impossible to imagine much of today’s work. And, in turn, we may not be able to imagine the jobs our students will have in the coming years. Fortunately, imagining the education that will take our students there is less difficult.

To educate today’s students, we should heed the advice of Ali ibn Abi Talib (599-661 CE): “Do not raise your children the way your parents raised you; they were born for a different time”.

Today’s students are different in five key ways: visual learning, collaboration, critical and creative thinking, digital involvement, and control of their learning.

1. Developing visual literacy

Today’s learners grew up with the rich multimedia of computers and are used to exploring ideas independently. They’re less dependent on teachers for the information they want, and often find it in surprising ways. For example, avoiding dictionary definitions and instead doing image searches to understand new words.

What you can do

Develop students’ visual literacy. Do they know the differences between bar charts, pie charts and Gantt charts? Can they interpret the data in line graphs and Venn diagrams? Can they apply what they know to present and explain ideas in dynamic ways? Expose students to a range of visual formats, from illustrations to diagrams, and give them tasks where they have to use them.

2. Encouraging collaboration

Schools were traditionally organized around competition, aimed at separating the most able students from the least able. But teachers today can’t ignore those who seem less able; we need to be more like doctors, devoting the greater part of our time and resources to those who need it most. Our aim should be to bring everyone up to the same level.

What you can do

Collaboration involves offering more tasks where students can help each other, particularly getting more able and less able students to work together to benefit from peer teaching. More able students may resist, but remind them that one who teaches learns twice.

3. Facilitating critical and creative thinking

Critical thinking has become far more important than schools’ traditional focus on memorization. Employers expect that students will become problem solvers. Gone is the factory model of employees doing repetitive jobs; those are now more efficiently and effectively done by machines.

What you can do

Traditionally, teachers have asked questions for which they know the answer and for which there is only one answer. Try to ask more open-ended questions for which there may be multiple answers. Ask questions to which you don’t know the answer. Encourage creativity. Ask students to brainstorm, and then use analytical skills to determine the best answers.

4. Leveraging the digital environment

Today’s students are digital natives. They first learned to type on digital keyboards and, since then, have embraced phones as a key resource. English writer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) said there were two kinds of knowledge: knowing a thing or knowing where to find it. For today’s students, finding information has never been easier.

What you can do

Many teachers dread phones in the classroom, but they are powerful computers that let students connect to online learning resources and learn what they want, when, and where they want. Steer students toward using their phones to improve their English but also teach them to be reflective about the sources of the information they choose to use.

5. Offering autonomy

Today’s students are too often referred to as clients, suggesting that the teacher-student relationship is no more than a business arrangement. It’s wrong to think so but, at the same time, we recognize that today’s students are savvy about assessing what they need to learn and how they would prefer to learn it. They have grown up with ideas about multiple intelligences (Gardner, 1993).

What you can do

Open a dialog with your students to see if they have learning preferences and whether these preferences can be accommodated in the classroom. Give more individual projects letting students choose topics based on their needs and interests.

Even among elevator operators, there were those who were better or worse at their jobs. Perhaps the greatest skill for students today is a sense that they need to take responsibility and examine the needs of any task or career that interests them, and figure out how to learn the skills that will get them there.

Reading in English can be one of the most challenging activities for young learners and teenagers, especially when they don’t get much enjoyment from reading in their own language.

These four reading strategies are fun, high-energy, and educational ways of getting even the most reluctant students involved in your reading lessons.

1. Bring outside interests into the classroom

Many students find it hard to get enthused by the reading texts used in their classrooms; they might feature complex vocabulary, be too generic, or just not resonate with their interests. An effective way of reaching out to the more reluctant readers in the class is to use reading materials related to the media they enjoy engaging with in their leisure time.

����app’s Marvel series of graded readers provides an ideal opportunity for bringing popular movie culture into your learners’ reading skills development. All of the readers are designed specifically for use in the classroom and feature an integrated skills approach that reinforces vocabulary and helps develop language skills. The readers come with activities to complete throughout the book rather than at the end, and key vocabulary is highlighted and defined.

Excitingly, most of our readers come with downloadable audio files (MP3s), so the students can listen along and hear the stories come to life. The audio can help students model pronunciation, get used to different accents and dialects, and make it even more accessible for students who are still less keen on reading.

2. Gamify the reading experience

By adding simple game dynamics and mechanics to your reading activities, you can add a competitive and fun element to your classes. This could help maintain the interest of learners who might otherwise lose enthusiasm.

The “dictogloss” activity is a good way of adding that extra element as it uses a countdown timer and peer-to-peer interaction to make the reading more of a competitive game.

First, find a good level and age-appropriate story for your students. Before you begin reading the story, tell your students to pay close attention because they are going to re-tell it themselves later.

You will need to read the story to the students in an engaging way, occasionally stopping, and asking students what they think will happen next.

Afterwards, allow the students five minutes to write as much of the story as they can remember in their notebooks.

When time is up, put the students in pairs and allow them to compare stories and correct each other, combining their stories, so they have a complete version. Help students by writing key vocabulary on the board as they request it.

Finally, hand out the original story for students to compare. Get feedback to find out what new vocabulary they have learned and help them make corrections in their stories where needed.

3. Experiment with high-energy activities

Reading doesn’t have to be a sedentary activity. Make use of the classroom space and use movement as a way to motivate and engage your students.

Add a dash of physical activity to your reading task by turning it into a running dictation competition. At the same time, they will practice a whole range of skills; reading, listening, pronunciation, and writing.

Before the class, stick some level-appropriate reading materials to a classroom wall; ideally, you should space it out well and have one reading sheet for every two to four students (the material should be identical).

Put your students into pairs and tell them they are going to have a reading race. Nominate one student to write and another student to dictate.

Students who are writing must sit at a table on the opposite side of the room to the reading material. Students who are dictating must go to the text on the wall, memorize as much of the text as possible, come back to the writer and dictate what they can remember.

Pairs must write as much as they can in four minutes, and when you get halfway through the activity, students should swap roles.

Finally, ask the students to swap their papers and listen to your dictation, making corrections and asking questions as they go. The pair with the longest text and fewest errors is the winner!

4. Go beyond the text

Taking a text and making it into something entirely original can also be a powerful motivator for creative students. Those who complain that reading is boring or too hard will have an extra reason to get through a story if there’s a promise of creative fun at the end of the task.

Tell students that once they have finished reading, they must re-imagine the story and characters and adapt it for a radio show, complete with sound effects, music and scripts.

Depending on how creative your students are feeling, they could write a sequel or a prequel, or adapt the existing story – ideal if you’re using a superhero reader from the Marvel series.

They will need to review vocabulary and pronunciation, remember the details of the original story, explain the characters and their motivations, and plot and write their own scripts. Students can find sound effects on YouTube and record the whole thing on their mobile phones, or a school computer.

By turning a book into a creative project, not only can you motivate students to read, but you will reinforce vocabulary, pronunciation and have a lot of fun doing it.