Just kidding. I’m talking about summer break. Specifically for kids in grade school.  Did it ever occur to you to go to school all year round?

Probably not. I’ve always taken the summer break as a given. In high school, I felt it was my God given right.

But now more and more schools and parents are considering year long school. Instead of playing video games and sleeping till 3 PM, perhaps your children could be doing more with their minds.

Studies have shown time and time again that the brain does stagnate without any intellectual stimulation. Children who attend summer school or camps consistently score higher on testing. Isn’t this something we should be worried about?

Give this article a read as it goes through the lives of children who attend year-long schools and the effects it has on them.

Year-Round School? My Kids Love It. Yours Will, Too.

My second-grade daughter went to school the other day and made potions in her Harry Potter class. My son’s class of fourth– and fifth-graders wrote movie scripts, filmed them and learned how to edit them on the computer.

At their Alexandria public school, my kids have learned how to sail, designed entire cities in cardboard, built skyscrapers with toothpicks and marshmallows, performed in a musical and built and set off rockets on the front lawn. They’ve created passports and had them stamped after “visiting” countries around the world. They’ve learned CPR, calligraphy, Japanese, rollerblading and how to make art like Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. My daughter was in kindergarten when she came home bubbling about Picasso’s Rose period. In Spanish.

My children attend a year-round school. And these are the kinds of hands-on, big-project classes that are taught during “intersessions,” or short breaks throughout the year that take the place of the long, lazy, Huck Finn summers that most Americans have come to think of as an inalienable right of childhood.

Far from grousing about missing out on the months-long summer break that will start in a few weeks, my kids love year-round school. My daughter had no idea that she was learning chemistry when her Harry Potter class made butter beer and chocolate frogs. My son developed a much better grasp of plot and character when he had to create both on film. I love their so-called modified calendar, too. And so, most of all, do the lower-income parents who’ve watched their kids thrive on it.

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