Ep 119 // The Summer Learning Slide: 8 Tips for Teachers to Help Avoid It!
Inside This Week’s Episode: — If you’re an elementary teacher, then you likely know that the summer learning slide is a real thing! Let’s help avoid the summer slide with summer learning opportunities that feel more like playing!
Links & Resources Mentioned in the Episode
Click HERE for Take-Home Summer Activities (Includes Map Skills, Spin a Story, Library Scavenger Hunt, Reading, Science, 16 Activity Cards, and more.
Summer Take-Home Kits:
Join the LINKtivity® Learning Membership - CLICK HERE to join!
The Summer slide is a Real Thing.
Unfortunately.
It’s that time in the summer where students’ brains flip the “off” switch and go into mush-mode. When they emerge in the fall, they’ve lost some of that academic progress that they made with you during the school year. (womp-womp)
It happens. And it’s not your fault. But - we can put into place a few preventative measures to help keep the summer slide less dramatic.
The thing is - I DO think students need a break. They do need to just relax and chill - just like their tired teachers do (pssst: that’s your reminder to take a break, too!).
BUT - we also can give students some fun opportunities for learning at home.
However, it’s learning that looks more like playing and exploring.
I want to share 8 things that student can do — that they will WANT to do — over the summer to keep their brains fine-tuned.
Set realistic expectations for summer learning
I know that it's nice to imagine students crafting epic stories or reading stacks and stacks of books, or want to spend hours at the library researching a topic - but it’s likely that they won’t. But - we don’t need them to keep up the same stamina that they had during the school year.
We just need them to fire off their brains for a few minutes each day. Just enough to keep their skills a little sharp, keep those neurons activated. That’s all.
Some kids will do more, but the majority won’t (and that’s OK, too!).
And, we also don’t want to put a huge burden on family to have to monitor and keep a strict schedule of academics over the summer. So let's set everyone up for success. Let’s provide students with a variety of activities that are fun and engaging, and summer-friendly.
Turn Reading & Writing into a Game
It’s all in the presentation. If we can make learning look like playing - students will be more likely to want to do the activity. So if we want students reading and writing over the summer, we gotta make it feel like play.
Story Wheels: Spin-a-Story
One way to do that is to provide students will a story wheel so that they can spin a story.
Here’s how it works:
You can create a paper spinner, like a game spinner, that has several sections. In each section you can have pictures that could spark inspiration for a story. For example, my story wheel has one section with a camping scene, another section has a beach scene, one has a picture of a kid flying a kite. Maybe yours has pictures of a local amusement park or something else your students would enjoy writing about.
Then - using a paperclip and a pencil, students can create a make-shift spinner and spin a story. Whatever picture they land on determines what type of story they will write. So, if they land on the picture of the beach, they can write a story about going to the beach. Give students some fun writing paper or a summer journal and you’re good to go.
Library Scavenger Hunt
Another way to make learning look like play is to send students on a library scavenger hunt. Here’s what I mean: I had a fun scavenger hunt sheet that prompted students to find different kinds of books at their local library. One part of the scavenger hunt challenged students to find a book about the rain forest. Another challenged them to find a book by a specific author or a book about a famous person. One part of the scavenger hunt even challenged students to find a book that identifies the biggest bird in the world. The important part of this scavenger hunt is NOT the topics and people that they find books on - it’s the experience of going to the library. You can choose any topic, person, or place for students to hunt for book about.
The scavenger hunt was the perfect way to get students into the library with a purpose. And — once their there, they can check these books out to read at home. It keeps them practicing their research and library skills and keeps them reading!
The “Read here… Read there… read Anywhere…” Challenge
Speaking of reading - we can make that a fun challenge, too! My third tip to avoid the summer slide is to encourage students to spice up their reading habits by challenging them to read in a variety of places. I would send students home with a sheet that encouraged them to read at the beach, or read at a picnic table, or in a tent, around a campfire, under a tree…ANYWHERE!
Each time they read in one of these places, they recorded it on their sheet. This activity reminds students that we can take reading with us everywhere! And, it motivates kids to keep reading throughout the summer. Challenge them to pick the most unique place to read!
Make it a competition among friends - who can read in the most unique or weirdest place?
Summer Math, Science and Social Studies
Reading and writing don’t have to steal all the summer fun. Here are some ways to incorporate other content areas as well.
Temperature Trackers
Another fun learning/playing activity students can do over the summer is to create a temperature tracker.
This one’s easy. I gave students to page with several blank thermometers on it. Then, I encouraged students to track the temperature one day a week, on the same day. Every Monday, for example, students would color in a thermometer with the daily temperature. Then, they would turn their temperature readings into a bar graph to see how the temperature fluctuated over the summer.
Track your Travels
Another thing that many of our students do over the summer is travel. They may go visit family or friends in another state, or go on a vacation. So - while they’re traveling, or even when they get back, have students color in the states that they traveled through on a country map. You can even have them total up the number of miles that they traveled (with the help of an adult, of course).
Daily Learning Bursts
This next tip is perfect for encouraging students to sneak in some quick learning activities daily. I would send home several activity cards with quick, bite-sized tasks that students could complete in just a few minutes each day throughout the summer.
Remember - in the summer time, we just need students to activate those brain cells a little bit at a time. We just need them them to fire them up for a burst of learning.
So, on these learning activity cards are quick activities like:
Find 5 objects in your house that are shapes like a hexagon (or other shape)
Recite all your multiplication/addition/division/subtraction facts for number 1-4, or 5-10 to an adult
Go outside and write down as many animals as you see in 30 minutes.
Quick, easy, fun, effective. Students can even put these cards folded in a jar and pick a card each day to complete.
Take-Home Learning Kits
The next summer tip takes a little more prep up front - but I’ve got 2 resources that make it super easy. My tip is to send students off into summer with math and science take-home kits.
Here’s how they work: In my take-home math kit are several math games that students can play all summer. These games review a variety of math skills.
All the game pieces and directions fit right in a Ziploc quart-sized bag (complete with a festive bag topper), making it easy to transport home and store all summer long so students can keep practicing some critical math skills.
Like the take-home math games, you can also send home some simple take-home science experiments for students to complete over the summer. These science experiments use simple, household materials.
For example, in my science kit I had 5 experiments (directions & observation log included). Inside the baggie I would provide them with as many materials as I could - materials like a balloon, a q-tip, a straw, string, etc. — all of which are materials used in the science experiments. And then, families would only need to fill in some other basic materials like a jar, water, etc…
The experiments were simple and easy to do and fun!
Take-home math and science kits are perfect for avoiding the summer slide!
Send Your Students to Summer Camp
This last tip is my favorite and I’m so excited to finally share about it!
If you’ve been around for a bit, you know that the main way that I support teachers is through my LINKtivity® interactive learning guides. If you’re new and don’t know what a LINKtivity® is, then think of it like a multimedia EDU-venture.
LINKtivities are digital explorations where students learn about a new topic through video, audio, graphics, text, photographs, and sometimes even interactive websites like Google Earth. They are incredibly interactive and engaging.
At the beginning of the 2022 school year, we opened the doors to LINKtivity® Learning - a membership that houses our entire library of LINKtivities (which, by the way, has grown to nearly 100 LINKtivities at this point - that’s almost double from where we started at the beginning of the year!)
And, as we have gotten closer to summer vacation I began thinking about ways to use LINKtivities to help support students in the summer.
LINKtivities are an amazing 21st century tool during the school year for teachers to engage students through this multimedia learning experiences - but the digital nature of them also makes it ideal (& EASY!) to access at home as well.
So, we came up with an AMAZING learning opportunity for students to keep exploring and learning over the summer.
Introducing for the first time: LINKtivity® Learning Summer Camp.
Summer is the perfect time for students to dive into topics that may not be part of your traditional curriculum.
And that's just what LINKtivity® Learning Summer Camp is all about. We're giving student permission to dive into topics like:
🦈sharks
🚀the universe
🎢amusement parks
🦖paleontology
🚢sunken ships and buried treasures
🔦caves
....and more!
The LINKtivity Learning Summer Camp is an 8-week summer learning program. Each week provides campers with a new high-interest theme that kids will explore through an interactive LINKtivity.
Campers explore the weekly theme from a variety of multimedia: video, photographs, audio, and even through virtual field trips using Google Earth.
Then, students are invited to take their learning off-screen (because we don’t want kids on screens alllll summer!) with additional related learning experiences that encourage them to go outside, create art, check out related books at the library, listen to podcasts, and even bake!
We’ve put this all together for our LINKtivity Learning members so that they don’t have to do a thing! They simply have to share a link with students so that they can access the summer camp LINKtivities from home. We’re even giving them a letter to share with families explaining how the summer camp works.
With a new theme each week, and fresh new extension activities to compliment each theme, there’s enough fun to last them all summer.
Not only is it a great opportunity to share with your students, it’s also ideal for any kids grades 3-5! So, if you have your own children in that age category, we’d love to have them in Summer Camp, too!
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