"This is Your Brain on Summer"

An article in the NY Times today addresses the major problem of what happens to learning over the summer (i.e. it disappears, or rather, gets backtracked).  The title of the article is 'This is Your Brain on Summer," and it specifically challenges the notion of a 9- or 10-month school year and 2-3 months of nothing but fun and R&R.  While I love the idea that kids need a couple months a year to re-group (as do teachers!), I also recognize as an educator that summer break significantly (and detrimentally) impacts student learning and achievement.  I call this phenomenon, "This is your (Jewish) Brain on Summer." In Religious School, the learning drop is particularly significant with Hebrew.  We spend the school-year trying to help all our kids reach a certain baseline knowledge of Hebrew (or rather, we help them learn to 'decode' Hebrew, to sound out words by identifying letter and vowel combinations).  It's an educational challenge all year long, but by the end of the year, we do see significant improvement.  Most of our kids feel reasonably comfortable with Hebrew decoding by May.  However, we then go on break for the summer, and when they come back in September (almost 4 months later!), many kids have lost much - if not all- of what they learned the previous year.  One of the main reasons for this is that a large percentage of our kids do not see or encounter Hebrew at all over the summer.  If they do not attend services, go to a Jewish summer camp, visit Israel, or have Hebrew books at home, then they are in a Hebrew-poor environment (i.e. one that lacks any connection to Hebrew).  It's parallel to the kids from less affluent backgrounds described in the NY Times article, who spend their summers in environments without a lot of academic / reading enrichment.  For our kids, without an environment over the summer that supports ongoing Hebrew or Jewish learning, they backpedal significantly.  I'm not sure how to address this problem, but I do think it's something to consider when we take a look at our goals for Hebrew education and what's reasonable to accomplish in a supplementary educational setting!