Don’t let your kids’ education slip this summer — build Camp Digital Learning

The end of school brings a few perils. My biggest fear is the “summer slide.”

Kids reportedly fail to retain as much as two months of math and reading instruction as they while away the idyllic hours of summer with TV, YouTube, “Minecraft,” texting with friends and other mind-numbing fun. Teachers gripe that they spend the first few months of the school year reviewing the learning that was lost.

I’ve seen it firsthand. Ten weeks out of the classroom is enough time for a 12-year-old to forget how to calculate the area of a triangle or for a 9-year-old to confuse “its” and “it’s.”

Typically, at the start of summer, my husband and I vow the slide won’t happen. We institute a reading program and make assignments from math workbooks, keeping track of the whole operation from a whiteboard in the kitchen.

Cue the power struggles, as we hound them to crack open a book or pick up a pencil.

Eventually, as the summer weeks slip away, our desire to accomplish much slips as well, and we hope the effect won’t be debilitating for them once school begins. But, chances are, they too will need teachers’ “fall review.”

“Kids go backward over the summer, from the advanced kids to the struggling kids,” said Ellen Siminoff, chief executive of Shmoop, an online education site that offers online classes on a range of topics such as SAT prep, pre-Algebra and the works of Dr. Seuss. “Every kid has issues.”

So this year, we are tapping into the vast number of digital resources that are increasingly available to supplement classroom learning or help home-schooling families.

Welcome to Camp Digital Learning, my children.

My criteria is simple — I want their experience and mine to be simple, easy to manage and fun. If it can fill a few gaps in our summer schedule, even better.

Siminoff suggests that parents resist the urge to create a full curriculum. Instead, she recommended picking “one thing they sort of have to do, and one thing they want to do.”

Of course, rather than just plunk a child in front of the computer and wish them well, it is a good idea to do a little research. Try out the programs first, say the experts.

Francisco Nieto, an instructional technology program manager at the Alameda County Office of Education, said that parents might want to steer clear of programs in which a child passively clicks through the content. He recommends programs that let kids create, such as Storybird, which offers curated illustrations to stories that kids write.

There are also online programming classes, such as Scratch, for making video games, animation and art. Nieto calls Scratch’s free community “arguably the best place to start learning to code.”

“This is an opportunity for parents to take a little more ownership of their child’s learning,” Nieto said.

I poked around Khan Academy, the Mountain View-based educational services company. While mostly geared to older students, it offers free personalized math courses that use “adaptive technology,” which assesses students’ mastery of the topic and ramps up the difficulty of the subject matter as the students are ready. (And yes, these classes are aligned with the new Common Core standards.) Khan also offers a dashboard for parents and kids to monitor progress.

Amazon has TenMarks, its free summer math program that spans Grade 1 through Algebra 2. TenMarks claims to be winning the war against the “summer slide.” Last year, 69 percent of its students reversed summer learning loss, according to the site, and 11 percent had an average learning gain.

My kids took self-assessment tests with ScootPad, which offers a three-month summer math and English language arts program for free.

We liked how ScootPad offers both math and language arts, and how its dashboard is easy to understand. Like other programs, it offers rewards that can be used to play online games, fun avatars and emojis and other gimmicks to appeal to youth.

But does it actually teach anything? ScootPad claims one hour of use per week will “accelerate learning by 2.51 x or more.”

I’m not sure what that means.

Asked whether he learned anything from using ScootPad for an hour, my 12-year-old said, “I guess.”

That, in my household, is a ringing endorsement.

Contact Michelle Quinn at 510-394-4196 and mquinn@mercurynews.com. Follow her at Twitter.com/michellequinn.