Books that help kids retain knowledge on summer breaks

Most education experts say that children lose about three months of knowledge over the summer and teachers have to spend the first two months of the new school year catching up. Fortunately, there are ways to keep what they learned firmly inside their head.

These two books not only offer ways stay to connected to your kids but they also help you brush up on subjects you probably haven't used in a decade.

Bedtime stories are a wonderful way for families to spend time together - and to get kids to learn to love books. The goal of Bedtime Math is to make math a fun, engaging part of children's lives and to make it as beloved as the bedtime story.

Each section starts with fun trivia about such topics as flamingos, bungee jumping, exploding food and team mascots. Then, there's an equally fun math problem - involving simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, logic and other math functions - that uses what you just read as "props". It's all such fun that you'll find yourself reading the book long after the children are asleep.