A Summer Learning Plan: Parents and Children Working Together

Summer break is a good time to take advantage of some of the many resources available in your community while spending extra time interacting with your child. Home tutoring and/or working with your own child to reinforce basic skills and/or to engage in enriched learning activities throughout the summer months will allow parents an opportunity to monitor their child’s learning progress while spending one-on-one time together. Parents and children can work together to explore learning options, set goals and create a learning plan.

Creating an effective plan while narrowing the choices should be a reasonabnle task. Following are some questions to think about and ideas to consider:

What are your child’s leaning goals? What skills would help prepare your child for the next grade level? Would it be helpful for your child to focus on multiple academic areas or to practice/learn skills is one specific area? Have you asked for feedback and ideas from your child’s current teacher and/or upcomming grade level teacher?

A balanced summer learning schedule could include regular opportunities to do one or more of the following. Discuss and prioritize possible learning goals and determine how often your child is willing to commit to doing these activities. Here’s a sample plan:

• Read for a minimum of 15 minutes daily, 5 times each week.
• Practice writing 15 minutes per day, 5 times each week.
• Do ten math problems daily, 5 times each week.
• Do something physically active for 60 minutes every day of the week.
• Do some type of service learning project one time per week.

Now, work with your child to come up with choices and ideas for carrying out weekly/daily learning goals.

Reading – Visit your local library one time each week. Make a list of books that match your child’s reading level, that he/she wants to read. Keep track of number of books, pages and/or time spent reading.

Make or buy a writing journal at the beginning of the summer. Be sure to give your child feedback on specific writing goals that you and your child agree on. If the goal is handwriting, the feedback should focus on letter formation, spacing,etc. If the goal is elaboration of ideas or paragraph organization, the feedback should focus on these skills. Positive feedback that encourages further writing will go a long way.

Doing ten math problems per day, five days a week is a reasonable goal for most children. Buy a math workbook that matches your child’s skill level/summer math goals and select specific math games on the computer that incorporate your child’s math goals/skill level.

Discuss and plan activity choices such as swimming, walking, riding a bike, skating in a nearby park.

Discuss ways your child would like to help others and explore local community service learning options such as: visiting older adults in a nursing home, sorting food in a local food pantry, serving food in a soup kitchen, planting trees or plants in a nearby park and/or picking up litter in a your community.

Special activities that you do together as a family can count as one or more of each of your child’s daily/weekly goals. For example following a recipe to bake cookies for a neighbor can count as reading, math and community service. Playing a board game that involves math skill practice can take the place of doing ten math problems. Working with your child to plan and choosing learning goals and learning choices, and sticking with your plan, while working in time for flexibility and plenty of time for summer fun are important and should ensure a successful summer of learning for both parent and child.

Find or make a calendar for the summer months and let your child pencil in his/her choices for physical activities, service learning projects and special events so that he/she might feel more motivated to take responsibility for advance planning.

Look for more ideas and links to incorporate into your family summer learning goals in upcoming blog topics!

If your child could benefit by incorporating help with math into your summer learning plan, there are online tutors who can help.