Blogs Summer slide. It’s real and it’s hard to avoid. Rather than spending weeks at the beginning of the school year re-teaching material that your students have forgotten over the summer, check out these tips to preserve the progress your students have made this year.
Summer Reading Bingo
Create your own Bingo sheet with the books you want your students to read this summer. You can offer prizes to the student(s) who gets “Bingo” first. You can even create a classroom blog or website so students can update their progress throughout the summer and motivate each other to keep reading.
Do-it-Yourself Math Camp
Encourage your students to engage in at least one challenging math problem or puzzle every week over the summer. There are many free ideas online, or you can create your own puzzles based on the concepts that you want your students to master.
Summer Writing Prompts
Journaling is a popular way to keep brains engaged over the summer. If you’d like to give students more direction, you can also provide writing prompts for them to use. What do you want students to write about? You can ask them to read a newspaper article every week and reflect on what it means to them, explain a current event that they are concerned about, or write about a unique challenge they had to overcome during the summer. The ideas are endless, and you can ask students to read one of their entries as a breaking-the-ice activity at the beginning of the school year.
Remember, one of the best ways to prevent summer slide is by teaming up with families to ensure your students are staying engaged when they are outside of the classroom.
