summer slide

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74 Creative Ways to Stop Summer Brain Drain

July 4, 2012 | 8:00 AM | By

Flickr: NGader

Keep kids’ brain muscles flexed with fun learning exercises. This year’s Summer Learning Series features 10 Awesome Outdoor Learning Ideas, 10 Fun Indoor Learning Projects, Four Ways to Prepare for College This Summer, and to round out the numbered lists, this collection from Accredited Online Colleges.

READING AND WRITING

  1. Keeping up with reading and writing skills over the summer is key to maintaining learning throughout the year — so pay special attention to these creative learning activities.
  2. Create a book club: Make reading social with a summer book club for kids
  3. Keep a journal: Encourage kids to stay sharp in their writing by keeping a journal, discussing summer activities and more.
  4. Find summer writing camps: Older kids can check out summer writing camps, often available through local newspapers.
  5. Read throughout the day: Offer reading opportunities morning, noon, and night, with the newspaper, websites, books, magazines, and more.
  6. Write a comic strip: Develop creativity, writing, and humor with a fun comic strip.
  7. Read books about summer activities: Before heading to the beach or a baseball game, pick Continue reading →
FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, summer slide

Keep Learning and Making: 10 Fun Indoor Summer Projects

June 11, 2012 | 12:31 PM | By

By Jennie Rose

Summer’s here and along with valuable time spent outdoors learning and embarking on adventures, kids can use downtime at home to keep those brain circuits exercising indoor, too. To that end, here are 10 ideas for indoor learning opportunities.

1. START A TUTORING BUSINESS. Students who excelled at any subject in school — math, writing, art — or even piano or using Minecraft, can lend their skills to help someone else learn those subjects. Spread the word through school and neighborhood email lists, and by calling summer camp directors or program coordinators at local community centers.

2. PLAN A MISSION. Dream up a LEGO Technic engineering mission and work with friends on completing the mission using the LEGO Technic building system. Kids can find ideas for missions at MY LEGO Network, a new social networking site built especially for children. They can build a LEGO page on MY LEGO network to show off their team’s work.

3. LEARN TO BE A WEBMASTER. Using a free toolkit like Thimble from Mozilla, kids can learn some basic web skills and how to build a site. Thimble is designed to give novices an easy-to-use online tool to quickly build and share web pages. Younger learners who aren’t ready to learn programming can start with plug-and-play blogs like WordPress and Blogger.

4. AUTHOR A WRITING PROJECT. Budding writers can start a week-long writing project focused on a specific theme. Write about animal skeletons and types of clouds; or invent TV cartoon characters based on exotic animals, or spend the week writing about magic or food or chocolate. Re-imagine your favorite fairytales with your chosen theme. Write and draw short stories, poems, or illustrations inspired by the subject you’ve chosen. Turn the storytelling process upside down by using pictures and math equations to tell a story, or describe a classroom through a teacher’s eyes, or describe the days of the week as if they were people. Find hundreds of writing prompts on this Tumblr blog.

5. BUILD A ROBOT. PR2, the $285,000 robot designed by Willow Garage, started with simple microcontroller programming. Kids can begin building their own robot creation by making a mini-kissing bug or an Animatronic Parrot. Explore the growing fields of embedded hardware, Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, summer slide

10 Awesome Outdoor Summer Learning Ideas

June 8, 2012 | 11:10 AM | By

Thinkstock

By Jennie Rose

Summer can be a mixed bag, a combination of relief from the stress of school, followed by boredom, the bugaboo of a creative mind. The break from school offers a chance to carve out enriching, fun projects and beat the doldrums brought about by summer loafing. The warm weather is a great invitation to enjoy and learn about the outdoors during this time off. Here are 10  learning opportunities for kids to come away from the summer months invigorated with fresh skills.

1. EMBARK ON BIRDWATCHING ADVENTURES. Local chapters of the Audubon Society host birdwatching outings, where those new to birding can benefit from the expertise of the pros. Kids can learn about the local ecosystem, as well as wildlife adaptability and habitat preservation. If birding catches their fancy, they can keep the adventures going with YardMap, a citizen science project designed to cultivate a richer understanding of bird habitat. The YardMap network lets you draw your landscapes with a beautiful online mapping tool and connect to other citizen scientists, solve problems, share maps and ideas, all while helping to build database of habitat data for Cornell Lab of Ornithology Scientists.

Flickr:EdwardGoodwin

2. GO ON A HIGH-TECH TREASURE HUNT. With a GPS device and coordinates from geocache.com, kids can participate in a scavenger hunt and look for one of a million treasure spots around the world. If they find the cache or hidden treasure, they can re-hide it in the same place or stash their own goodies in a hidden spot. The best part is logging the finds and sharing their experiences on the site.

3. HANG A ROPE SWING. With about 10 feet of rope and a buntline hitch knot, it’s easy to build a tree swing. Kids can learn knotting and building skills and do the math to determine attachment points and rope lengths. If the backyard won’t work, there’s always the nearest park.

4. FARM THE BACKYARD. Anyone with any amount of space can grow food. Whether it’s starting a small herb garden on the fire escape or building raised beds in the backyard, the process of growing food allows kids to develop an understanding about our food sources, nutrition, how Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, citizen science, summer learning series, summer slide

50 Creative Ways to Prevent Summer Brain Drain

July 1, 2011 | 3:30 PM | By

Flickr:NGader

Reading prevents the dreaded "summer slide" - even if it's at the beach.

The Fourth of July weekend is a great opportunity to take a break, but during the rest of the summer, it’s important to keep those brain muscles flexed with fun learning exercises. We’ve written about math games, ideas for reading exercises, and technology and science projects, and of course, MindShift’s own 50 fantastic educational apps, games, and toys.

Similarly, Accredited Online Colleges has created this comprehensive list of 50 creative ways to fight the summer slide, a collection of ideas from all across the Web (including MindShift). Goes to show that ordinary summer activities like opening up a lemonade stand or going to a baseball game can be turned into learning opportunities. They asked me to repost, and I do so with pleasure. Enjoy!

READING AND WRITING

  1. Keeping up with reading and writing skills over the summer is key to maintaining learning throughout the year — so pay special attention to these creative learning activities.
  2. Create a book club: Make reading social with a summer book club for kids
  3. Keep a journal: Encourage kids to stay sharp in their writing by keeping a journal, discussing summer activities and more.
  4. Find summer writing camps: Older kids can check out summer writing camps, often available through local newspapers.
  5. Read throughout the day: Offer reading opportunities morning, noon, and night, with the newspaper, websites, books, magazines, and more.
  6. Write a comic strip: Develop creativity, writing, and humor with a fun comic strip.
  7. Read books about summer activities: Before heading to the beach or a baseball game, pick out a book that discusses the activity.
  8. Email friends and family: Have kids write to friends and family over email to keep in touch while also keeping up with their writing practice.
  9. Encourage reading in bed, even if it pushes bedtimes: Allow your children to read in bed, even allowing them to stay up later as long as they are reading.
  10. Start a blog: Create a blog for your child to update over the summer, and share it with family and friends. Continue reading →
FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, summer slide

Preventing the Summer Slide with DIY Tech and Science Projects

June 13, 2011 | 10:57 AM | By

Instructables

Continuing our summer slide series, in which we’ve offered ideas on how to keep learners’ math and literacy skills sharpened, we now turn our focus to science and tech-related ideas. The summer months provide a great opportunity for students to work on projects that help extend some of the ideas they might have learned during the school year or to pursue ideas that they might not have had a chance to do in the classroom.

Here is just a short list of projects that could help prevent the summer slide in science and technology.

1. BECOME A CITIZEN SCIENTIST

Citizen science takes scientific inquiry and research out of the lab (and out of the sole purview of scientists and researchers) and puts it in the hand of those without formal scientific training — “citizens,” volunteers, and, yes, students. There are a number of ways that students can engage in citizen science projects over the summer, whether they’re spotting animals or identifying plants. Here are a few suggested apps and websites.

2. LEARN TO PROGRAM

Despite the explosion of the number of tech jobs, very few students actually have an opportunity to learn programming at the K-12 level. Programming remains a project that many students do outside the classroom, hacking on their home computers. There are a number of tools that can help even very young children learn how to program, including Scratch and Kodu. Here are a list of a few programming languages that make a good place for budding computer scientist to start.

3. BUILD A ROBOT

Summer vacation is only two or three months long, so the suggestion to build a robot might seem ambitious. But in addition to the new tools that make it easier for kids to learn how to build software, you Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, Instructables, Kodu, LEGO Mindstorms, science, Scratch, STEM, summer slide

Preventing the Summer Slide in Reading

June 9, 2011 | 2:48 PM | By

Flickr:India.ca

In our last post on finding alternatives for the summer slide (the loss of academic skills and practice during summer months), we focused on math skills. Practicing reading skills is also crucial to maintaining a learning regiment during the summer — that much more so for low-income kids.

“On average, middle-income students experience slight gains in reading performance over the summer months,” according to Reading is Fundamental. “Low-income students experience an average summer learning loss in reading achievement of more than 2 months.” This achievement loss is cumulative, accounting for the major gaps in reading levels between income levels once students reach middle and high school — an up to 2 year gap in some cases.

An article in The Washington Post suggested several ways educators can do help, including offering students summer reading lists and distributing books. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Reading, summer slide