Practice over a long break

A small amount of contact over a holiday is worth doing. A summer of worksheets is not — and there is no scary statistic here, because the honest one does not exist.

15 August 2026 · updated 15 August 2026 · 6 min

What a long break actually costs

Less than the marketing around this subject implies, and not nothing. The honest position is that skills which have been practised recently and not yet become automatic are the ones that go quiet — a letter learned three weeks before the holidays, a times table that still needed thinking about. Things that were fully automatic tend to still be there.

You will find plenty of pages with a figure attached to this. There is no number here, because the studies people cite measure different things in different places and the number would be doing persuasion rather than information.

The practical version: a small amount of contact over a break is worth doing, and a summer of worksheets is not.

Little and often, and much less than you think

Ten minutes, a few times a week, is a realistic and useful amount over a break. Not every day — a schedule that requires every day fails in the first week and the failure tends to end the whole thing.

The goal is contact rather than progress. You are keeping something warm, not teaching it. That is why the material should be things they can already do rather than the next thing: revisiting letters they have got is genuinely more useful over a break than introducing ones they have not, and it is far more likely to actually happen.

Short and often is the general case, and a long break is where it matters most, because there is no external structure holding anything in place.

Attach it to something that already happens

The hardest part of a break is that the day has no shape. A practice slot with no anchor gets postponed until it is bedtime.

Attach it instead: after breakfast, before the pool, in the car, while dinner is cooking. An existing routine supplies the trigger, and the trigger is the part that is actually failing when "we didn't get round to it" happens four days in a row.

Keeping the materials somewhere visible does more than it should. A folder in a drawer is a decision every time; a stack on the kitchen table is not.

Most of it should not be worksheets

This site prints worksheets and this is still true. A break is the one time of year when the everyday version of a skill is easy to reach, and the everyday version sticks better.

Writing that has a reason. A shopping list, a label on a drawing, a postcard, a note left for someone, a sign for a den. Purpose does more for handwriting than an extra row of letters, because the child cares whether it is readable.

Reading that is not being assessed. Anything they choose, including the same book for the eleventh time, including comics, including reading to a pet. Being read to counts and keeps counting long after a child can read alone.

Numbers where they occur. Money in a shop, doubling a recipe, scoring a game, counting laps. Times tables in particular survive a break better as a chant in the car than as a page.

A useful proportion is roughly one part sheets to three parts of the above. The sheets are for the specific things repetition genuinely helps — a table that has not stuck, a letter that keeps coming out backwards.

The week before going back

Worth a small, specific effort, and not the one people make. Cramming in the last week does very little.

What helps is restoring the shape of a school day: moving bedtime back where it belongs a few days early, eating at the usual times, and doing one short sitting-at-a-table activity so that the first morning is not the first time in eight weeks anyone has been asked to sit down and concentrate.

The transition is usually the part children find hard, rather than the content.

And if none of it happened

Then none of it happened, and that is a much more common outcome than the internet suggests. Children have gone back after breaks with no practice for as long as there have been breaks, and the first weeks of term exist partly to pick things back up.

A break is also doing something. Rest, being outside, being bored, playing — none of it shows up on a worksheet and all of it is load-bearing.

Everything here is free to print whenever you want it, in whatever quantity turns out to be realistic.

Editor's notes

Written by Kids Worksheets Free about the piece above — not reader submissions.

1. The missing statistic is the point of the opening

   Every competing page on this query carries a figure for how much children lose over a summer, and those studies measure different things in different places. Repeating one would be doing persuasion rather than information — and persuasion aimed at an already anxious parent, which is the specific thing this site refuses to do.

2. One part sheets to three parts everything else

   The ratio is invented. It is offered because "do some of both" is unactionable and because the failure mode this page is written against is a parent buying a workbook and running a school timetable through August. If the proportion is wrong for your family, the direction of it is still the useful part.

3. The last section exists for the parent who did none of it

   It is the most likely outcome and the internet is unusually punishing about it. Rest, boredom and playing are doing something that does not appear on a worksheet, and the first weeks of term exist partly to pick things back up. A page that ended on the schedule would leave that reader worse off than it found them.