BEST PRACTICES TO CONDUCT SUMMER SCHOOL PROGRAMS

Have you ever found an old dried up sponge under your sink? It’s been there for ages, doing nothing; serving no purpose. Kids are natural sponges. It’s up to us to squeeze them a bit so knowledge can continue to be absorbed.

A “program” is defined as “a plan of action to accomplish a specified end.” A program can be costly…but it can also be free. A “summer school program” can take place anywhere from specialized camps at universities to your backyard. The Summer School Program you decide upon for your child should accomplish the “specified end” a continued journey into lifelong learning. Today’s blog is a brief chat about a few best practices that can be a supplemental to formal programs or a stand-alone summer bridge plan.

A report from The National Summer Learning Association www.summerlearning.org reported that 66% of teachers feel that it takes at least four weeks to re-teach material to students at the beginning of each school year to get them back on the track of “learning.” This number is appalling! …and preventable. “Learning” is not something that can be wrapped into a box of 180 days X 6 hours! Lifelong learning skills should be implemented continuously; a weekend is not a “break from learning,” nor is summer!

The months of vacation from the end of one school year to the start of the next should be filled with summer activities for kids. The cost for these can be 0-hundreds of dollars. The price is not necessarily commensurate of the value received. Due to the number of two-parent working homes, daycare and summer camp-for-money programs must sometimes be limited by the dollar amount that parents can afford for more costly supplemental options, but that doesn’t mean that learning should take a vacation! Every library in the nation has a FREE Summer Reading program for children. These are broken into age groups and usually offer some reward system from stickers to free books. Books are our most valuable resource and reading should be something that all of us do daily! A weekly visit to the library should be on everybody’s list! The value received goes up when this is an activity shared between parent and child. Through books you and your children can “travel” to far off lands and excitement; investigate the world of lions and tigers and bears…or insects, plants…oh YEAH! Oh, my!

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