6 Must-do Learning Games & Activities For the Summer
June 3rd, 2010Can you do your own summer learning program?
Should you do your own summer learning program?
Fact: More than half of the achievement gap present in 9th grade between lower- and higher-income children can be explained by summer learning loss.
Make Learning Stick with learning games and reading fluency training over the summer. There are many things you can do at home to bridge that summer learning gap.
- Reading Fluency using Five Minutes to Better Reading Skills…and Yes…it only takes 5 minutes to do. Sally Shawitz, author of Overcoming Dyslexia states, “I urge parents to make fluency training their number one priority.”
- Take a weekly trip …to the zoo, a local park, the pool, the river, a local factory…and afterwards as a family write down what you did and what your favorite part was…using the fill-in-the-blank forms from Ten Minutes to Better Study Skills and create a booklet to keep for all of your weekly trips.
- Do some nature activities such as listening to outdoor sounds, nature rubbings, shape hike, incher hikes … again use the fill-in-the-blank forms from Ten Minutes to Better Study Skills to describe what you found or did.
- Activities to do at home like making puppets and putting on a puppet show. Bake cookies together, have a backwards day where you eat dinner in the morning and breakfast in the evening, do add-on-stories. Again write down your favorite things or worse things about the activity.
- Have a Game Night or a Game Day…choose learning games…they are fun as well as work on skills. Some great ones are The Sentence Zone (play & learn sentence building and grammar while having fun) , The Comprehension Zone (play & learn reading comprehension and listening comprehension), or the Math Zone (play & math calculation practice).
- Read books together…and write a review or report on it, or have a review night where you all act as book reviewers of the book you read.
Check out the books, games, and guides here:
Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET
Learning during the summer is good. It keeps kids ready to go back to school when that time comes around. However, kids should always be allowed to have some fun during the warm season.
Hi Bonnie,
I found your comments and website very interesting to read. There are so many things we can d to help dyslexic children today. Sometimes it just takes a little imagination. But I have to say that I loved your ideas and I also have many that have been very effective with dyslexic children or struggling readers. Thanks for sharing, I enjoyed reading your ideas. Thank you Linda