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- Coffee and Curriculum: Creating Your Own Summer Curriculum/
Summer is FINALLY here, and it’s a great time to ramp up all the fun activities you enjoyed doing during the school year. When you were on a time crunch during the school year, you had to stop whether your students wanted to keep learning or not. Now that it’s summer, you have plenty of time to immerse yourselves in whatever interests your family.
Summer is traditionally known as a time to take a break. Unfortunately, if given permission, teens will take a complete break from any and all sorts of learning during the summer months. As a result, students lose two to three months’ worth of learning. Many students lose two months’ worth of math skills over summer break, and possibly lose another two to three months’ worth of reading skills during summer vacation. Let’s face it: the summer slide is real!
With these things in mind, what can you do to prevent your students from falling down the summer slide? The best thing you can do for your students is to make sure they keep their math and reading skills sharp all year long and especially over the summer. But how?
When developing your curriculum for the summer, the first thing you’ll want to ask yourself is what subjects you want to cover and what you hope to accomplish. For many families, this will only be math and reading/language arts. Others may want to cover a whole spectrum of learning that includes history and science topics. For this post, we’re focusing on the two most important subjects: math and language arts.
Once you’ve decided what you want to cover, decide how to cover those areas. Do your students work best independently or with oversight? Is math something your students can understand with just a little explanation, or do they need you to explain most of the concepts to them? These are the types of questions to answer in determining how you’ll teach this summer. After you have the answers to these questions, you’ll be ready to hone in on each subject and pull your curriculum together.
Now that you have an action plan and some idea of where you’re headed for summer homeschooling, it’s time to pull together some resources! Here are some resources for learning during the summer months:
Summer is a fantastic time to slow your pace and relax. It’s also a good time to brush up on skills and subject areas that may have given your students a rough time during the school year. Even if your students did just fine all year, one slide you don’t want to see them travel down is the summer slide. You can avoid the summer slide by keeping your students on their toes academically!
June 29, 2018
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