Yep, I Make Them Do Homework During Summer Vacation

The summer between my third and fourth grade years, I managed to forget my multiplication tables.  All of them.  An entire grade of math vanished in the span of two sun drenched months. My mind was wiped clean, or maybe water logged from too many somersaults in the lake that summer.

I was a walking, talking poster child for the case against Summer Vacation.   Despite plowing through everything Beverly Cleary that summer, I still managed to lose some grade school brain power.  Math wasn't my strongest subject to begin with, so it was no wonder that I simply forgot all about it when allowed eight glorious weeks without it.  After all, I had better things to do with my pre-pubescent time.  Things like recording Casey Kasem's top 40 on my portable tape recorder.  Or pining hopefully for a pair of Dr. Scholl's clogs.  Or even coasting through our 1960s built neighborhood on my second hand Schwinn.

Multiplication tables were blissfully absent from my summer vacation.

Their absence wasn't noticed until I arrived back in the classroom that fall and found out that I wasn't the only one who suffered from summer learning loss. There were others just like me.  Other dazed and confused fourth graders who, during the first few weeks of school, stared, panic-stricken, at the blank multiplication worksheets put in front of us.   That year I was as close as any nine year old could be to developing a stress-induced ulcer.  And so began my life-long loathing of Math.


Because I am the kind of parent who frequently, but (mostly) subconsciously, tends to transfer my own childhood anxieties onto my children, I am enforcing a summer homework regime here in Boy Town.  I don't want them to fear math like I did (do).  Also, good math skills are key to mastering cribbage, an old card game that is a family core competency around here.

The boys?  Are not happy.

I take that back.  One boy is not happy.

The Five Year Old is tickled with giddy pre-Kindergarten giddiness every time he opens his workbook.  But really, what's not to like about dot-to-dots and farm animal mazes?

The Second Grader (soon to be Third Grader) is pretty miserable at just the notion of entertaining the idea of throwing around the thought of picking up a pencil.   He's too busy reading.

I am not above resorting to a little bribery now and then,  and so, if the only way to get him to complete his work is to offer a dangling carrot (or video game) at the other end, then so be it.

And since elementary school academics have been accelerated by a full year since I was in school, The Second Grader is, you guessed it, practicing his multiplication tables this summer.

He'll thank me later.  I'm sure of it.


Because I'm nosy interested, what about you?  Do you make your kids practice what they've learned over the summer or do you put down the pens and pencils for two months?