Fun and Painless Summer Learning

When I was in grade school, I regularly sat down with educational workbooks that Mom had picked up at the store and filled out pages and pages of worksheets. I even played teacher, assigning worksheets to my younger sisters and brother and then grading them.

I’m pretty sure that I’m the exception though. Most kids will not voluntarily spend summer vacation playing school. In fact, the families you talk with may tell you that it’s hard to find a way to sneak in summer learning without their children and teens staging a revolt.

How can you make summer learning so fun and painless that kids won’t even notice? Encourage families to tie educational projects to the things they’re already doing and the events they’re already talking about. Playing school probably isn’t going to work for most families, but reading texts and doing some research about the things kids and teens are already interested in will.

The Calendar on the ReadWriteThink site has dozens of activities that you can urge parents to try as part of their regular fun during the summer. If the family is planning any of these events, for instance, there are related calendar activities:

• Visiting a zoo or museum
• Enjoying some ice cream on a warm afternoon
• Spending a day at the pool
• Going to a baseball game
• Taking a road trip

Remind families that the dates don’t matter as much as their connection to what they are already doing together. Ice cream was first sold commercially on June 8th for example, but families can check out the books and websites from that calendar entry whenever they take their trip.

If children and teens are already interested in specific topics, there are key dates in the calendar families can visit for more information on subjects such as dinosaurs, the moon, and railroads.

Current events are also a great lead for educational discussions. As hurricane season gears up, for example, families can visit the entry on Hurricane Katrina for resources to explore together.

Of course, there are also specific holidays that lend themselves to educational explorations. Make sure families know about the entries for Juneteenth, Flag Day, and Independence Day.

For more resources, you can also point families to the New York Times Learning Network. This free site is a great option for more information on a current or historical event, and often provides educational materials on breaking news topics. Be sure to point out the Student Challenge The Times as Your Summer Reading, a contest for students ages 13–25.

Whatever families do this summer, remind them to keep the summer learning fun and painless. The more educational activities are connected to the summer fun families already have planned, the more effective and engaging it will be. After all, students don’t have to realize they’re doing something educational for summer learning to happen!

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by Jon Ovington]

School's Out ... Explore, Learn, Grow!

My own children have their last days of school this week. In their end-of-year newsletters, their teachers shared suggestions of what the kids should read over the summer.

The early elementary teacher recommended that my daughter read fifteen minutes per day, with a break on Saturday. The intermediate grade teacher shared her read-aloud list from the year. All the books she read this year were series books, and she read only one book from each of the series. The teacher invited the kids to read the other books from the series.

The girls are already great, motivated readers, so I am not worried about getting them to read this summer. They have our trips to the library and bookstores mapped out! As their parent, I will be suggesting they do something after they have read some of their books – so they can make connections to what they are reading. I want to see them writing, creating, organizing, and brainstorming.

There are so many activities to try on the ReadWriteThink Learning Beyond the Classroom site that can help with this.

• We can record the books we read this summer using a Reading Record Chart.
• I can work with my younger daughter on setting a budget and writing a shopping list using advertisements from the newspaper. She can work on her writing as well as her math skills. My older daughter can join in on this project by exploring the labels on the foods on our list. She can help us determine which foods are best for our family. We can all work together to create a new commercial for one of the products we purchased.
• We can create a new board game to play on days when we need to stay inside. She can think through the rules and the layout and then we can make it together!
• My older daughter can write to her favorite authors after reading some of their books. She can also read their blogs to see what the authors themselves have to say!
• As a family, we enjoy watching the film versions of books. Our current favorite is Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Together, we can learn about filmmaking and create our own scenes based on our favorite moments from a selected book.

Regardless of what we specifically do this summer, I know we will work together on reading and writing. I want to make sure we prevent summer loss and start the school year as prepared as we can!