10 Ways to Avoid Summer Slide

10 Ways to Avoid Summer Slide

Summer slide is the term used to describe the loss of skills many students experience during the time off from school. This article reports that a Duke University professor’s study found students may lose one to three months of learning.

Cooper’s study also showed that summer loss was greater in math than reading and had the biggest downward trend in math computation and spelling.

If your student is currently attending a Gideon Math and Reading center, you are already ahead of the game and keeping his or her brain sharp!  We can make incredible gains in just a few minutes each day.  If not currently enrolled, we consider summer a great time to address issues from the year before OR to get ahead as the stresses from the normal school year are eliminated.  If you are off on vacation or looking for other ways to engage your children, check out our links below. (more…)

Kick off summer reading!

Kick off summer reading!

Summer is here! Camp! Swimming! All day play! Reading!

Wait, what?

Yes, reading! Think of all the time now your child has to get lost in a book. This is a great way to avoid the summer slide of losing some of the great comprehension skills gained during school year. Your child can read about new places and fun experiences while gaining vocabulary and background knowledge that will aid in the fall. Encourage children to read a wide variety of topics and types of materials – books to magazines to comics to newsletters. Allow your children to pick out titles based on their interests to keep summer reading fun and enjoyable. You could read the book along with your child to create discussions. Read parts of it aloud to one another, especially an adventure or mystery, and get creative with the voices of characters.

This article from the Idaho Statesmen has other great ideas to make reading fun especially for younger children.

Read them a story, Richards says. That sounds simple enough, but there are nuances to making it a lasting experience.

– Be familiar with the text — even if you just give it a quick scan before you start reading.

– Work on varying your voice so you don’t deliver it in a monotone.

– Make it a shared experience. Hold the book close to the child so they can see the pictures and the words. Let them touch it.

For older students, encourage them to go beyond the latest book that is being turned into a movie. Have them take a look at classical literature, historical fiction, and biographies to keep pushing their comprehension and preparing for college level materials. According to this article from KERA,

“…after the late part of middle school, students generally don’t continue to increase the difficulty levels of the books they read.”

Last year, almost all of the top 40 books read in grades nine through 12 were well below grade level. The most popular books, the three books in The Hunger Games series, were assessed to be at the fifth-grade level.

Last year, for the first time, Renaissance did a separate study to find out what books were being assigned to high school students. “The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read,” Stickney says, “has declined by about three grade levels over the past 100 years. A century ago, students were being assigned books with the complexity of around the ninth- or 10th-grade level. But in 2012, the average was around the sixth-grade level.”

Most of the assigned books are novels, like To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men or Animal Farm. Students even read recent works like The Help and The Notebook. But in 1989, high school students were being assigned works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Emily Bronte and Edith Wharton.

Now, with the exception of Shakespeare, most classics have dropped off the list.

While reading what interests them does keep students reading, parents and teachers ought to push them to continue finding harder materials to digest. At Gideon, we’ve taken classics such as Black Beauty and Swiss Family Robinson and incorporated them with comprehension questions into our program. The passages are longer as many are complete chapters. Some of the vocabulary does require a dictionary as it is outdated, but it creates the habit of looking up unknown words and using context clues. The settings and problems presented in these classics have some great differences to today’s modern world which can make it very interesting to the student; yet at the same time these stories have timeless themes to which they can relate.
Black Beauty A
Black Beauty B
Black Beauty D
Black Beauty C

Professor emerita of education at the University of Arkansas, Stotsky firmly believes that high school students should be reading challenging fiction to get ready for the reading they’ll do in college. “You wouldn’t find words like ‘malevolent,’ ‘malicious’ or ‘incorrigible’ in science or history materials,” she says, stressing the importance of literature. Stotsky says in the ’60s and ’70s, schools began introducing more accessible books in order to motivate kids to read. That trend has continued, and the result is that kids get stuck at a low level of reading.

“Kids were never pulled out of that particular mode in order to realize that in order to read more difficult works, you really have to work at it a little bit more,” she says. “You’ve got to broaden your vocabulary. You may have to use a dictionary occasionally. You’ve got to do a lot more reading altogether.”

“There’s something wonderful about the language, the thinking, the intelligence of the classics,” says Anita Silvey. She acknowledges that schools and parents may need to work a little harder to get kids to read the classics these days, but that doesn’t mean kids shouldn’t continue to read the popular contemporary novels they love. Both have value: “There’s an emotional, psychological attraction to books for readers. And I think some of, particularly, these dark, dystopic novels that predict a future where in fact the teenager is going to have to find the answers, I think these are very compelling reads for these young people right now.”

Reading leads to reading, says Silvey. It’s when kids stop reading, or never get started in the first place, that there’s no chance of ever getting them hooked on more complex books.

Read the rest of the KERA story HERE.

Need some help finding the age-appropriate books?  Ask your local librarian and check out these LISTS from scholastic.com

3 Summer Writing Assignments

3 Summer Writing Assignments

Many kids will read over the summer, but will they write?  With creative writing taking a major role in education these days, some extra practice over the summer could give a needed boost for the fall.  A journal entry about the day’s events is simple and easy.  But if you are looking for other options, this article from the Washington Post gives some great ideas. We’ve listed 3 below.

Unfortunately most students fall out of the habit of writing during summer vacation unless they are given assignments. Students become better writers through practice, and summer provides an opportunity for them to write without the external pressure of grades and testing.

Descriptions

For a shorter exercise that focuses on showing and not telling, describe an object in the room without stating what it is. Alternately, pretend that this is a first encounter with this object, so the writer doesn’t know the object’s use. What does the object appear to do? Can a reader guess the object based on the description?

Blogging

For students who would like to write for publication, blogging provides a way to participate in a community through writing, responding to posts, and linking to other online content. Students can create blogs dedicated to a personal interest, such as a sports team or photography or the imagined adventures of a family pet.

Adaptations

Students can make stories their own by modifying them. A story set in the past can be retold in a contemporary setting or vice versa. Characters can change from human to animal. Stories can cross cultures or genres. For example, write the story of Snow White as a Western or set “Jane Eyre” in the contemporary United States.

Creative Writing
Want more options?  Check out the rest of the article.  Also read 10 Steps Toward Better Writing.

Need some structure for your student’s writing practice?  At Gideon we have students describe fun pictures in 1 or 2 sentences which is great for younger students.  Older ones have to create a short story using 3 given vocabulary words.

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Contact us today to receive more information about your selected center. That’s one step closer to mastery!

Why summer reading is essential for your children

Why summer reading is essential for your children

From golocalworchester.com:

Saturday, June 09, 2012

John Monfredo, GoLocalWorcester Education Contributor

 

All children look forward to the summer time as a break from the daily routine of going to school. However, for many children, it’s a time when, as the researchers say, the achievement gap widens. This is the time that researchers call the summer slide (the learning loss that occurs over the long, lazy summer break). The summer slide is the result of children being away from school and not reading. Reading is like playing a musical instrument, for it is a skill that continues to improve through practice.

Some districts across the nation have made summer learning a priority based on research that has found the summer months caustic for low-income students who lack opportunities in enrichment and are not encouraged to engage in literacy activities.

Low Income Students Affected More

The especially tricky thing about summer learning loss is that it tends to disproportionately affect low-income students whose families lack the money to send them to summer camp, buy them books, or take them on outings and vacations. For the low income children a lack of books poses the greatest barrier to achieving literacy. This is the reason I started Worcester: the City That Reads,” and the organization has collected over 120,000 books during the past six years, putting them into the hands especially of low-income children for summer reading.

As a former principal and now as a school committee member and director of Worcester: the City that Reads with my wife, Anne-Marie, I have worked to make the community aware of the summer slide and have continued to encourage the community to address this issue. I’m pleased to say that each year more and more social agencies are including literacy as part of their programs in the summer time. However, more work still needs to be done! We still need additional summer programs, more parental awareness, more health agencies talking about both nutrition and literacy, and our schools need to give this issue a high priority.

In addition, more outreach to our parents is needed for parents are the child’s first and most influential teachers and it’s up to them to make sure that children continue reading throughout the summer months.

Study after study confirms that students who attend summer programs can halt the educational loss and do better in school than their peers who do not attend the same programs. Instruction during the summer has the potential to stop summer learning losses and propel students toward higher achievement. My advice, get your child into a summer school program!
Parents, do you know that…

•Children who read one million words in a year score in the top two percent on standardized tests.
•In a year, children learn 4,000 to 12,000 new words by reading books.
•91% of children are more likely to finish books they choose themselves.
•Out-of-school reading habits of students have shown that even 15 minutes a day of independent reading can expose students to more than a million words of text in a year.
•The U.S. Department of Education found that, generally, the more students read for fun on their own time, the higher their reading scores.

Whether through a large bookseller, a literacy program, school, or your local library, it is easy to find a summer reading program for your children, of any age, to participate.

Here’s something to consider: Barnes and Noble has a summer reading program that requires kids to read any eight books, and write their favorite part of each book in a reading journal. When kids bring their completed reading journal to their local store, they get to choose a free book.

Another book company, Scholastic, has a summer challenge for kids – to read every day this summer. Their free online program involves logging reading minutes and earning prizes. They even have a Reading Timer app that can be downloaded for free. Scholastic is also encouraging students to help set a new world record for summer reading.

As we all know the best bargain in town is still your Worcester Public Library, and all parents need to do is bring their child to the library and get a library card. The card will be their ticket for summer reading and to a life time of enjoyment. On the negative side of this issue, many parents don’t find the time to bring their child to the library or live so far away from the library that it is difficult for them to get to the library. Well this year we have the “Mobile Express”, a library on wheels that will be visiting neighborhoods. Check with the Worcester Public Library and see when they will be in your area.

Parents need to remember that in the Worcester Public Schools that summer reading is required for your child before returning to school.

Information will be sent home with the children during “Reading in Our City Week… June 10th” and the requirements (five books read and an activity sheet for each of the five books count for 10% of the first quarter English grade.) There is a list of authors for children to consider. Parents are also given suggestions on how to help their child at home which include providing a space in the home with a variety of reading materials, reading daily with your child for at least 20 minutes a day, and also the importance of bringing them to the library.

Other suggestions that I’d like to share with you are as follows:

•MAKE THE TIME – Establish quiet reading time after lunch or in the morning as a part of your child’s daily summertime routine.
•SHOP SMART – look for books at yard sales and used book stores for you could save yourself some money.
•CHECK FOR READING TIME MEETINGS – check out the Worcester Public Library, books stores such as Barnes and Noble, and museums.
•TURN OFF THE TV – During the summer, it’s more important than ever to limit the number of hours of television children watch.
•REWARD READING – It’s fine to use incentives. Start with a sticker chart and let your child earn new paperbacks or special outings with you.
•COOK AND READ – As you prepare a meal together, have your child read the recipe aloud to you.
•WRITE BOOK REVIEWS – Whenever you read a book to your child together write a short review. The review might read, “I can’t believe the things that Pippi dreamed up to drive her parents crazy.”
•LIBRARY TIME – Go to the library together and find a good book. If there is a movie about the book get the movie too. Then compare the book with the movie and include lots of details about why one was better than the other. Remember, the library can provide you with all the books you’ll ever need, free of charge. The investment is nothing more than a little bit of your time with a guaranteed return that can’t be measured.
•MANY CHILDREN’S MOVIES AND TELEVISION shows are based upon stories and books. Encourage your child to read books based on the story or television show. This is a good way to get adolescents and reluctant readers involved in reading books.

Who knows, by keeping children reading throughout the summer, your child may start off the new school year ahead of the game and be excited to share some favorite books with their new teacher and classmates! Let’s get our children reading and writing throughout the summer! Remember, children who develop the habit of reading not only learn to be better readers but also achieve greater success in school.

The bottom line is make literacy a priority in your home.

Need for education doesn’t end when summer begins

From insidebayarea.com
By Tom Barnidge
Contra Costa Times columnist

State Superintendent of Schools Tom Torlakson visited the Bay Area to deliver a message last week. Yes, schools need more money, but that’s not why he was at the microphone on this occasion.

He was telling anyone willing to listen that when the last bell of the school year rings, it shouldn’t mark the end of students’ education.

Field trips with the family, summer camps, visits to libraries and museums all serve to keep a child’s mind engaged. Trouble is, far too many kids in lower-income families often are without access to such activities.

The net result, he explained, is a phenomenon called “summer learning loss.” It seems the brain atrophies the same way athletes’ muscles do if allowed to go three months without exercise.

“We know from research at Johns Hopkins University that students who have a rich summer learning environment maintain what they learned in the previous nine months,” Torlakson said. “The students who don’t have that stimulating experience lose two of the nine months of math and English learning they had accomplished.”

That puts them at a disadvantage when school resumes.

The study, conducted by sociology professor Karl Alexander beginning in 1982, tracked the academic progress of 800 Baltimore students from first grade though adulthood. He found that “two-thirds of the ninth-grade academic achievement gap between disadvantaged youngsters and their more advantaged peers can be explained by what happens over the summer during their elementary school years.”Hence, the “Summer Matters” program that Torlakson unveiled with the assistance of Jennifer Peck, executive director of the nonprofit Partnership for Children and Youth advocacy group.

Her organization, which has brought more than $70 million to public schools and their community partners in the past nine years, has stepped to the forefront in seeking funding and promoting summer enrichment programs for the underprivileged.

“Heightening awareness is a huge piece of the puzzle,” Peck said. “There’s still a lack of awareness among parents about why it’s so important to keep their kids learning and reading over the summer.

“A lot of parents, particularly working parents, like to have time off in the summer — and more informal time with their kids — sometimes to the detriment of their academic success.”

Or, put less delicately: Leaving the kids plunked in front of the TV all summer will turn their brains to mush.

Continue reading here.

 

https://youtu.be/mk_JiwIjzXU