The Monthly Newsletter
Issue 103 | April 2014 | www.ei-india.com
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Cover Story: Keeping Kids of...
2
Educators’ Zone
3 School Zone ASSET Toppers
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Insight Story: Introducing Pace...
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6
Mindspark World
For Students
7
Misconception Series
8 EI Workshop
COVER Story Keeping Kids off the Summer Slide The summer vacation is traditionally viewed as a time when students can engage in pleasurable pursuits with their families and friends and forget about school. However, this does not mean that young people should neglect opportunities for continuous, active learning throughout the summer vacation.
instruction for most students. It can literally wreak havoc on a student’s academic growth and development over the years. The challenge we face as a community of learners is “How do we help our students resist the regression of knowledge that inevitably results from a summer vacation?”
Summer learning loss is a well-recognized challenge we face each year as educators when we say “goodbye” to our students for their two-month hiatus. The very idea of a “summer vacation” has changed due to the plethora of well-documented learning loss studies that show academic skills and knowledge steadily decline among young people when formal learning “stops”. While there are many factors that affect the rate of academic decline when students are away from school, one fact remains certain: all students are impacted regardless of home resources. Educators know that areas of decline among students typically result in lower reading comprehension levels, declining mathematical computation abilities, weaker literacy skills, a lessened vocabulary and a pronounced decline in all forms of procedurally-based knowledge learning. The “summer slide” in learning can account for the loss of an entire month of educational
We can start by recognizing a simple fact: a summer vacation is a great opportunity to build-in active learning experiences that build on the momentum of progress students acquire in the classroom. Parents, students and caregivers alike, can outsmart the summer slide when we build-in academically stimulating pursuits to strengthen learning and keep skills steadily progressing forward. First and foremost, young people need resources, strategies and engaging activities to keep their knowledge base fine-tuned all summer long. Continuous reading remains one of the most important and affordable activities to keep reading comprehension levels and literacy skills honed. All students should commit to the idea of reading 5 or 6 complex books while vacationing. This is not an arbitrary number. Interestingly, not only does this precise number manage to keep a student’s comprehension levels from atrophying, but also, in many cases it can get
reinforced over the summer. Teachers can recommend that parents review all suggestions below and consider these possibilities for active, continuous summer learning: • summer camp and summer sports programs to promote fitness, athletic skills, and leadership experiences • summer enrichment programs that target improvement in critical reading, mathematics and writing specifically • summer leadership programs that engage students in matters of global issues, teambuilding, and independence • purchase of a great book series with 5 or more books: making it a personal goal to read every book in the series These summer suggestions can function as an effective intervention for the purposes of academic remediation or enrichment. The summer slide can be totally prevented with careful planning, initiative and parental support.