Peggy's blog

Reading Joann’s post about fractions this week made me laugh. Her struggles with fractions were all too familiar to me! In all seriousness, though, it’s really too bad when difficulty with a particular topic turns a student off to that topic. Repeating drills and worksheets to encourage skills is not always successful, and it can frustrate students who don’t understand the material in the first place. Teachers have the tough task of presenting these topics in a variety of ways to keep students interested. When one method doesn’t work, a dedicated teacher tries something new. Sometimes, finding new and different approaches can be a challenge.

If you are like me, you have a giant collection of “stuff” saved just in case it will be useful someday for one project or another. Hot summer days are the perfect time to pull out this stuff and let kids go wild. How can you be sure they will do something productive with those old cell phones, paper towel tubes, and lovely containers of various shapes and sizes, though?

Summer is almost halfway over and kids who haven’t had much enrichment are starting to get bored. Some students have been keeping busy with camps, travel, and activities like watching television and playing video games, but many are looking to be more engaged. Many parents and teachers are looking for easily implemented activities to keep kids’ minds fresh for the remainder of the summer. It has been neat to see students trying out activities from our Summer Slide Buster Series here on the Gateway. If you haven’t tried any, we would love to have you try some this week! For even more ideas, look back through our archives.

The summer slide gets a pretty bad rap this time of year. We do our best to teach kids all school year long, but it seems the lazy days of summer counteract that learning. During the past four weeks, we have been posting activities each day to help combat this brain drain in your kids. Some of you have tried the activities with your own kids and some have forwarded the information on to parents and students, helping to enrich their summers and keep their math and reading skills sharp.

As we move through the heat of summer, I want look back to see how well we have been busting that summer slide! Camps, lessons, and summer activities can make it hard for parents to make time for enrichment at home. Holidays and a compressed schedule make planning a challenge for summer classroom teachers, too. Since we have been posting activities for each day, I wanted to compile them in this post so you can come back to those activities when you have time. Be on the lookout for more new resource suggestions on Friday.

The following activities focus on music and math, two subjects that can often be intertwined. These were featured on the Gateway the past few weeks on Music and Math Mondays.

Welcome to week 3 of our Summer Slide Buster series here on the Gateway! We have been having fun choosing and testing activities, and we hope you found some of our suggestions interesting and useful. Whether you are a teacher, a parent, or both, you can find activities on the Gateway to inspire all the kids in your life to keep their minds active during the break.

After the first week of testing the summer slide buster activities with students, I was reminded that the success of any learning activity is directly related to the way it is presented to students. There is a reason that little kids love how Mrs. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus gets so into the things she is teaching. Presenting activities as fun, exciting adventures can help create a cooperative, curious environment: perfect for summer discovery learning.

As a parent and teacher, I have seen the effects of the “summer slide” or “brain drain” both at home and in school. Kids who aren’t given the chance to exercise their brains during the summer break will most likely lose a lot of knowledge they gained during the school year. Parents have the tough job of helping their children stay educated, entertained and out of trouble during the summer months.

You have given everything you can to your students this year, and now you are about to send them off into their summer vacation. This break from school can often lead to the “summer slide” or “brain drain,” where they forget some of the skills they mastered during the year. It’s scary to think of how much of the year’s hard work can be lost during the summer; a time could ideally be very enriching for students. If you can reach out to students and teachers before and/or during the summer break with activity suggestions and ideas, perhaps you can help plug the “brain drain” this summer.

As each school year comes to an end, teachers around the world look back and wonder, “What did my students really learn this year? Did I cover all the topics I needed to cover? How much do my students understand?” If we are doing our job right, students should come away from the year knowing a lot more than when they started, and they should be excited for their next year of learning. In the moment, the students and teachers are probably slightly more excited for summer break, but hopefully the excitement for learning will come.