The holiday notebooks sell nearly 5 million copies each year. A success which testifies especially to the concern of the parents when the summer and the two months of holidays are looming… The children, them, often try to escape from it, and the end of the summer sometimes arrives without the pages of these famous notebooks have not been much filled.
Are holiday notebooks really the right solution for our children to consolidate their achievements? Aren’t there other ways to keep learning? Shouldn’t we favor rest during the summer?
Geraldine Mayr receives Isabelle Filliozat, psychotherapist, expert in positive parenting. She has published, among other things, Understand and educate your child (Marabout). It offers advice for making the best use of holiday notebooks and suggests other avenues for a summer that is both fun and beneficial for our children.
Isabelle Filliozat believes that for a child with learning difficulties the holiday notebook will not be adapted: in this case, you must first take advantage of the holidays to find out why his child does not succeed : is it psychological? was there any bereavement? sibling rivalry? Or is there a sensory problem, such as dyslexia. “It works much better than forcing him to make a vacation notebook”explains the psychotherapist.
It is true that summer being a fairly long period, the holiday notebook can be a good way to review what has been learned during the year, but without your child being obliged to do so. Good students like moreover often have a holiday notebookit is the most academic profiles for whom these notebooks are suitable, themselves designed as a very academic mode of learning.
But there are many other ways to learn and revise during the summer : write postcards, acquire a richer language through conversation with his parents, do math while baking cakes and collecting shells, as Brigitte, a listener, tells us about her grandson.
And then simply our brain building itself when we move, children will benefit greatly from running, walking in nature, interacting with parents and peers, developing good sleep habits. Notebooks can wait for the start of the school year!