Preparing for School Late in the Summer

Summer is almost over and I'm concerned that my children will not be ready for school. I know that over the summer children can lose skills, especially in math, that they learned during the previous school year. Do you have any thoughts on how I can prepare my children? - Concerned
Answer: It can be tough for students to get back into the swing again at school. Without some work in math in the summer, they can fall more than two months behind in this skill. The more they have made learning a part of this summer, the easier it will be for them to learn next year in school. It's not too late to take steps through fun activities to jump start their learning for the coming school year.
A Summer Math Activity: The more your children play with numbers, the more they will be intrigued by math. They are probably familiar with word palindromes, such as "dad," "mom" and "radar," in which the letters in the word are the same whether you read them forward or backward. Numbers can be turned into palindromes, too. Here is how it works. Take 145, which is not a palindrome. Reverse it and add (145 plus 541). Your answer will be 686, a number palindrome. Have your children try this with easy numbers like 57, 48 and 86. Then give them the challenge of turning 89 into a palindrome. They'll need to fill a page with the calculations and get a lot of practice adding.