As much as I would like to shout in merriment for the long stretch of festive season, I can’t help but whimper at the thought of how many skills it will drain with it. Let’s face it, while such vacations offer much-needed respite from school, they can have a measurable negative impact on a child’s mental acuity. Fortunately, this brain drain can be substantially or completely reversed if children participate in meaningful learning over the course of their vacation.

In an article: Prevent Vocational Brain Drain, Grace Chen asserts that, "vacation brain drain is a serious issue for children of all ages, but the stakes are much higher for kids in high school.” Indeed, teachers must spend a great part of every term reviewing and re-teaching material that students have forgotten during the long breaks. If parents tried the following suggestions, this crisis would be avoided.

The holidays are a great unstructured mass of time to try out new things and explore interests that don’t necessarily fit into the school curriculum. This doesn’t mean that children should be doing math worksheets and studying vocabulary lists to preserve the skills they have learned during the school year. Far from it, holiday is a perfect time for children to discover that learning is fun and can happen anywhere. "You don’t want your kids to think that learning is only something that happens in places called schools,” says Susan K. Perry, author of Playing Smart: The Family Guide to Enriching Offbeat Learning Activities for Ages 4-14. "Rather, you want them to grasp that learning is fun and can go on all the time, anytime, anywhere, with handy materials, not only based on the instruction of an actual schoolteacher.

Learning can take place whether you are taking a trip to a far-off place or spending the holiday in your own neighborhood. Get your children excited about visiting a museum like Inzu ndangamurag, Rwesero Arts Museum or Nyanza Royal Palace, Rukari. Turn your museum trip into a treasure hunt by trying to find those paintings or objects in the museum. Look for interactive exhibits and for periods of history that your child has studied in school.

Similarly, you can use their interests to induce learning. Watch football with your boy and calculate probability that one team will win. Make bating mathematical. Watch news and discuss politics; it will help with their history classes. What better way to learn the basics of science and how things grow than to plant your own garden? You can start with seeds or small plants. Talk about what plants need to be hardy: air, water, sunlight and nutrients. Vegetables are especially fun and educational to plant because your child will learn where food comes from and will also get to eat the end product.

What child wouldn’t be inspired to bake cookies or make fresh tomato sauce? A cookbook geared for children is a good place to start. Thanks to You-tube, we can access any recipe we desire and even learn the step by step preparation process.

Encourage your child to trim the lawn, baby-sit or volunteer at a shop. Even young children can learn to be responsible by helping to set the table, take care of a pet, clean out a closet, or wash the car. Ask your child to be your energy consultant and help find ways to conserve energy in your house. These are activities that will teach them responsibilities and give them a new perspective to life.

As with all things, moderation is generally the way to go. Finding a balance between taking a break and preventing brain drain will require some finesse, but once you and your kids are able to find that balance, you can get the best of both worlds: a child, who is relaxed and refreshed, with no need of remediation when school resumes after vacation.

The writer is a lecturer at The Adventist University of Central Africa