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{Contributed by Rose Williams}
How to Take Advantage of Online Tools to Beat the Summer Slide
Allowing children a break from school over the summer is all too easy–after all that hard work reading, writing and doing math, it’s natural to give them a chance to be carefree kids.
But carefree comes with a cost: a growing number of studies have demonstrated that students lose an average of one to two months of academic growth during the summer break, a phenomenon that has been dubbed, the “summer slide.” Teachers must then spend the first months of the following school year covering old material that students have already learned just to remind them.
The Internet, however, provides a number of tools to help parents combat this slippery slide backward. Make sure you’ve got the most bandwidth possible, as many of these resources will require heavy streaming. At InternetProviders.com there are plenty of options for families who need a faster, more reliable connection while there are kids at home using multiple devices.
(Image via Flickr – Some rights reserved by paalia)
Stimulate different learning styles
One of the main hurdles of getting children to read at any time is that reading is a primarily visual experience: we move our eyes across lines of text to create images in our brains. Some children respond better to other forms of sensory stimulation, however, and one of the virtues of electronic media is that they can use different senses to communicate. If your child resists sitting down quietly with a book and reading, try using an audio book in conjunction with text to spark their interest.
Kids can read along with the person speaking the words aloud, stimulating both auditory and visual systems; services like Amazon’s Audible provide high quality, dramatic recordings that can help stories come alive for young children, and make reading feel like less of a boring, solitary experience.
Gamify learning
Psychologically, the summer slide is a consequence of our tendency to treat learning as work for children; the summer break becomes a vacation where children can pursue other, more frivolous activities before they must return to work. But in reality, children never stop learning even while they are playing; the trick is to orchestrate what they learn during their play so that it advances the skill sets they are learning in school. One of the best ways to do this is through online learning games, like those offered at pbskids, that blur the lines between children’s work and leisure time.
Good learning games implement virtual rewards schemes that encourage children to progress just for the sake of completing awards or trophies; some even integrate social components so that children are driven to compete with their friends–they’ll complete tasks so that their friends can see the awards they’ve earned from the game. If parents can team up to get a peer group playing a single game system like this, they tend to spark more interest and long term engagement.
Enroll in an online summer camp
The Internet provides an easy way for young people to congregate, without the trouble and expense of getting them to a physical place; several companies have thus begun to sponsor online camps that offer fun, structured activities that encourage children to keep learning during those summer months. In particular, Google’s Maker Camp encourages students to engage in practical but fun activities, like building small robots or coding simple programs.
Children don’t have to be sitting quietly at a desk to learn; the multimedia nature of the internet offers a number of interesting ways for motivated parents to get them interested in their education and beat the inertia of the dreaded summer slide.
Rose Williams is a freelance technology writer with a focus on how the Internet improves our lives, from online education and mobile streaming to ‘stuff’ minimizing and beyond. She holds a B.A. in Technical Communications and is currently working toward an MBA. You can contact Rose directly via email.
Pary Moppins says
Great ideas. Also, the local library is a fabulous source of children’s programming and often local university’s will have summer day camps for kids.