Reply to Learning tools you will use with your kids this summer to help them get ready for the next grade?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote][quote]Rising 1st grader and preschooler. We will go to the pool. We will use sidewalk chalk. We will bake cookies. We will read books to each other. We will sing songs. We will dig for worms.

All of these are learning tools. Or did you mean drill-and-kill worksheets and/or edu-tainment electronics? We will not be doing any of those.[/quote]

I highly recommend "The Good School," by Peg Tyre. All children lose skills during the summer. The average is one month's worth of learning. For math, it's 2.6 months of learning that is forgotten. And that's for middle class and higher, who come from families who have the time and opportunity to do things like dig for worms and read together. It's much worse for kids from lower SES households or those with other challenges.

Another point I found interesting was the history of a summer break over the years. I always thought it was due to kids' having to help out on rural family farms, and that is true to some extent. But some of it was so urban kids could get out of the city (Pre-AC days) to their summer homes. None of it is due to what best promotes learning and retention.

Reading with your kids is probably enough to retain literacy skills. But some "drill and kill" is likely necessary for math skills.[/quote]

The pool is great for gross motor skills. We can also play around with math and science: physics, solid/liquid/gas, and basic addition, subtraction and multiplication based on a 25-meter pool. Buying snacks and getting change at the snack bar also reinforces math and money skills.

Sidewalk chalk is good for fine motor. We can read about sharks and draw a life-sized one, using the tape measure to talk about units of distance. Little guy can work on letter/number recognition while I play Hangman with the bigger one or help him figure out what 194,280,345,622 minus 187,884,203,117 is.

Cooking and baking are terrific activities to practice sequencing, fractions, and reading the recipes, plus social issues like sharing and turn-taking. We can make foods from different countries and talk about similarities/differences.

Digging for worms lets us talk about environmental science: the food chain, pollutants, diversity. We can measure our captives, graph them, read about them, draw pictures of them and even see whether they prefer the tomato plants to a pile of dead leaves.

I'm still not buying any of your workbooks.[/quote]

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