Don’t Let Your Brain Turn into Mush!

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Summer Learning
Your child has worked SO hard this year and deserves to maintain or even increase his/her skills over the summer!  Here are some ideas for keeping your child learning over the summer:

#1: READ!  

No other skill is more important to maintain over the summer months.  Children who read regularly are shown to have higher intelligence and general knowledge, less stress, better fluency, improved analytical thinking, broader vocabulary, better memory and increased writing skills. Please use every opportunity (long car rides, waits at the dentist/doctor, before bedtime, etc.) to have your child read to you.

  • Your child’s RAZ Kids account will still be available to you over the summer. https://www.raz-kids.com/main/Login 
  • Visit the public library.  Your public library has excellent resources for choosing appropriate books for your child.  Or check out some great online resources, such as: 
  • The last link is very helpful because you can enter the title of almost any book, and the webpage will display the level of the book, so you can see if it is consistent with your child’s reading level, including Fountas and Pinnell levels. (For instance, if you enter the title Curious George Rides a Bike, you will see that this book is at the J reading level.) Your child has been told which letter he/she has been leveled at, and this information is also available on the SEP form that was sent home on the last day of school.  If he/she doesn’t remember, it is a good idea to find a recognizable title that you know is within your child’s reading range and begin from there.
  • Also listed on the SEP form that was sent home is your child’s Lexile level.  Most libraries use Lexiles to level books, and you should be able to easily find books at the local library that are consistent with your child’s reading level. 
  • You may also continue to help your child by doing reading timings at home using the Zoo Animals reading passages: CLICK HERE for Zoo Animals Reading Fluency

  • #2: Write!

Writing is “backwards reading” and not only improves your child’s writing skills, but also improves his/her reading skills as well.  Encourage your child to use best penmanship and to sound out words phonetically, and assist your child in creating complete sentences that include proper use of upper and lower-case letters, and to include proper punctuation.

  • Encourage your child to keep a journal of events or discoveries over the summer months.  You may even have your child continue to use the extra pages in his/her first grade journal, which is in a format familiar to your child.  I strongly encourage students to write (with an actual paper and pencil!) over the summer – not just write electronically.  This helps to maintain proper penmanship and puts a greater focus on sentence structure, rather than on hunting for letters on a keyboard.
  • Electronic writing is great, too, though!  It is important that your child maintain familiarity with the keys on the keyboard! 🙂

#3: Math!

We learned SO many different math skills this year and it is important that your child remember these skills so that he/she can build on them in 2nd grade!  Review addition, subtraction, place value, time, measurement, 2 and 3-dimensional shapes, graphing, skip-counting, etc. with your child! ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS YOU CAN REVIEW OVER THE SUMMER ARE THE BASIC ADDITION AND SUBTRACTION FACTS UP TO 20.  THESE WILL BE VERY HELPFUL TO KNOW FOR DOUBLE-DIGIT ADDITION AND SUBTRACTION IN SECOND GRADE!

 

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