The long winter break often finds kids playing in the snow and checking out new presents. After a couple of weeks away from schoolwork though, it can be hard for some kids to get back into the school swing of things. Dr. Ken Gibson, founder of Colorado Springs-based LearningRx, offers the following five tips to keep your elementary school kid’s mind active during the holiday break. These easy and fun activities may also help your child to enjoy and succeed in school more than ever before.

1. Twenty Questions. This well-known game addresses the logic and reasoning skills critical for success in math (particularly word problems) and science. As a parent, help your child reason through the quality of each question and think through how it relates to previous questions. Your child may think it is a simple game to wile away hours in the car, but Twenty Questions also builds the deductive reasoning skills Einstein used to develop his Theory of Relativity.

2. Rhyme. Silly rhymes, poems and songs come naturally to your pre-schooler. But few parents realize the benefit of their silliness. In order to build your child’s pre-reading and spelling skills, come up with a few words that rhyme and have your child put them together into a story or poem. For example, fun, run, sun, ton. It’s a ton of fun to run in the sun!

3. Tic Tac Toe. Instead of the usual paper-and-pencil version, battle out the x’s and o’s in the air. Imagining the board and remembering the placing of the marks strengthens the visual processing skills your child needs to succeed in math, science, art and reading comprehension by training them to remember and discriminate details. This game primarily develops working memory and logic and reasoning through planning and strategy.

4. Scan the newspaper. Don’t throw away the morning’s newspaper. Instead, bring it along on a long car ride to speed your child’s reading, spelling and math. Pick a letter and have your child circle all they can find on a page (for example, p’s). To increase the difficulty, have them circle b’s and cross out d’s. This exercise can also help children who have a tendency to reverse letters – a common issue for young elementary children, but not necessarily an indication of a learning disability.

5. Lists. Children constantly have to remember a set of details for a test or homework assignments, making long-term memory a necessary skill. A simple exercise to strengthen long-term memory is to have your child think of a list – perhaps of the presents they want this year. With that list, link each item to the next, creating a virtual mini-story. Ball, doll, chocolate, sweater. The ball knocks over the doll and the doll lands in a box of melting chocolates, the chocolate spills onto the sweater. This creative and unique strategy will help children remember facts and lists, especially when you verbally talk through the story with them. The goofier, the easier to remember. And, this should also help when you give your child a list of multiple things to do around the house. As your child improves at any of these, add a time element or increase the length of the list of words in the exercise. This will help to develop your child’s cognitive skills and ultimately, help them to excel in school.

LearningRx was founded in 2002 to help individuals of all ages and performance levels by providing them with cognitive skills training to improve the brain’s ability to process information. Learning Rx’s enhanced individualized one-on-one training programs allow struggling learners or those wanting to further unlock their potential by changing the brain’s capacity by training key mental skills. Headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colo., LearningRx has 32 locations in 14 states across the nation. Please visit www.learningrx.com for more information about LearningRx and their programs.