If you have ever been to France during the summer vacation, you might have seen a puzzling sight: school-aged children bent over brightly colored workbooks, studiously filling out activity pages, practicing their writing, and working out math problems. Whether at the beach, at restaurant tables, or lying on the grass in their grandparent’s backyard, French kids seem to be addicted to learning, even during their long mid-year break. What gives?
First things first: these cahiers de vacances – literally ‘vacation workbooks’ – are designed to reinforce what a child has learned the previous school year, while also preparing them for the year to come. Originally conceived to create an additional spike in yearly book sales, today they are big business: all the biggest French publishing houses create their own cahiers, and according to a study by market research institute GFK, 4.6 million units were sold in 2018.
Many parents see them as a boon: they are widely available and an easy, inexpensive way to keep kids occupied during the break while also supporting their learning. The fact that France has a famously rigid school system in which the exact same curriculum is taught to all grades, in all provinces and overseas territories at the same time makes it even easier, as parents simply find a workbook written for their child’s grade, and off they go. But while the French may have been the first to design holiday workbooks, they certainly aren’t the only ones. There is now a wide range of self-guided learning materials available in pretty much any language you might desire, printed by educators, publishers, and private industries all over the world.
Some parents are against getting their children to do homework during the holidays when they need to decompress and play, but most agree that there is value in keeping kids intellectually stimulated over the break, in order to avoid the dreaded “summer slide”, the loss of academic skills and knowledge over the course of long school holidays that particularly affects young children.
While parents in Beijing may balk at the idea of getting their kids to do homework during the holiday break, when they have already had so much disruption to their learning this year, we believe that there is room to make learning fun, creative and exciting for kids so that they can reinforce what they’ve learned in ways that don’t even feel like homework.
If you’re looking for fun and creative ways to keep your kids engaged during the long summer weeks, we’ve rounded up a list of free online resources on our website, that you can download and print for your own kids. We’ll keep the list constantly updated, so be sure to check back regularly for more.
Free Printable Holiday Learning Resources for Beijing Families
This article appeared in the beijingkids 2020 June issue
