Keep Your Child’s Brain Growing! Great tips for summer or holidays!
During a break from school, many skills your child learned during the school year can be lost. To keep learning skills strong and to help your child reinforce the skills he/she learned during the year, here are a few pointers.
1. Visit the public library for great books you and your child can read together for fun. Biographies and non-fiction books are also a great source of informational topics that your child might be interested in exploring. The library also has summer programs that are often cheap, or even free.
2. Take an educational “field trip” to the city park, zoo, museum, or nature centers, or a stroll through the neighborhood or neighboring woods/fields. Make a scavenger hunt and have your child look for certain things on the “field trip”. Take pictures of the trip. When you return home, have your child do a journal entry about what he/she saw/heard/smelled while on the trip. When you develop the pictures, have your child match the pictures with his/her journal entry.
3. Planning a vacation? Let your child help you “plan” the vacation. What should we pack if we are going to the beach/mountains/cruise/lake/grandma’s house/etc. What are we going to do there? Who do you think we will see? What kind of clothes do we need to take for cold/hot weather? How are we going to get there? Let your child map the trip. Check out books from the library and let your child read about the place you will be visiting or cities/states you will be driving through to your destination. Have your child draw a picture of what he/she thinks your destination is going to look like and then compare the picture to the real place.
4. Going out to eat? Ask your child math and reading questions about the menu. If I had $5 what three items could I buy? How much change would I get back if I buy the hamburger, fries, and shake and pay with a $10 bill. What is the total of buying a burrito, drink, and fries? Look at the picture of the cheeseburger. In 5 words or less/more, describe it. Play “What Am I Describing?” Give your child a description of something on the menu and see if they can guess what it is. Tell me a story (or make up a sentence) that has 3 items off the menu in it.
5. Math around the house:
a. Help you child create a map of your house or neighborhood. Let your child help you make the list for weekly grocery shopping. See if he/she can sort items based on food “types” (canned, vegetables, candy, sweets, breakfast, dinner, lunch, or colors). Or, let them keep track of the groceries you are buying by marking items off your grocery list or keep a price total of the number of items you have bought. You can also tell them you are taking $20 to the grocery store and let them subtract items to find out how much you have left to spend.
b. Your child can also help with cooking or baking around the house. Allow them to measure the items as you put them together for the recipe.
c. Track the outside temperature for a week. Ask questions based on the results. How many days did it rain? How many days was the temperature above/below 90 degrees?
d. Sort laundry based on colors or piece of clothing. How many socks are in this pile? How many more socks did we have than t-shirts? What is the total of whites and colors?
e. Play board games that you have around the house. Ask questions as you play. How many more steps until someone wins? What would happen if… I rolled a six instead of a two? How much farther ahead are you than me? Predict who is going to win.
f. Google 100s chart and print off one. There are many activities you can do with a 100s chart just by googling 100s chart activities. Greater than/less than, multiplication facts (7 x ? is 42), multiples of numbers, give a number and see how many different ways your child can find on the 100s chart to make that number.
g. Math flashcards are easy and fast for games and basic fact recall. Play War or “If I have 7, who has a number bigger than 7”. How many flashcards can your child do in a minute? No flashcards, use index cards to write facts on for review.
h. Dice: roll a dice and see who can get to 21 (or pick a number) the fastest by rolling just 1 dice at a time. Or, roll the dice and see which sum comes up the most out of 20 rolls. Help your child chart the results.
i. Make a calendar and let your child track how many days/weeks/Mondays until school starts, your family vacations, or a birthday.
j. Look for different shapes around the house, neighborhood, or on your vacation. Let your child tally how many of each shape he/she finds. Or make a shape book with pictures of shapes your child finds in a magazine.
6. Language Arts:
a. Write a sentence(s) and cut it into individual words. Put the sentence (or each sentence) into a Ziploc bag. Let your child practice putting sentences together using the words in the bag. Question your child about the sentence depending on his/her age. Identify the nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. How could we make this sentence better? What word chunks do you see?
b. Have a DVR on cable? If so, pause your child’s favorite cartoon, movie, or television show. Ask them questions about what he/she is watching to assess his/her understanding. What do you think is going to happen next? What if this happened? Who is the main character? What is the setting? Why is the character happy/sad/angry? Come up with a new ending for what he/she is watching. If the people that made this movie came up with a sequel, what do you think it would be about?
c. Play Scrabble which is great for vocabulary and word chunks.
Pick a word family (at, ab, ag, an, am, ap, ar, ed, en, et, id, ig, in, ip, it, ob, og, op, ot, ub, ug, un, ut, um) and then see how many words your child can make using each “chunk”. Ex: the “at” chunk—cat, hat, bat, sat, fat, mat, pat, rat, etc. Have your child write sentences with the words he/she makes. Or, each of your can write a sentence and see who can use the most rhyming words in a sentence that makes sense. Ex: The fat cat wearing a hat sat on a mat and watched a bat chase a rat.
Pick a word and letter change. Ex: start with the word cat. Change the c in cat to an r and what word do you have? Rat. Change the t in rat to a g and what word do you have? Rag. Change the a in rag to a u and what word do you have? Rug. Change the r in rug to a h and what word do you have? Hug
f. Read a book together and ask the 5 W questions: Who, What, When, Where, and Why. Let your child act out the book for a family entertainment night. Draw pictures of the setting, main idea, or characters. Have your child compare and contrast the main character to a family member or him/herself. Or, have your child think about how the setting of the book is alike/different to your house/room.
g. Let your child practice writing his/her name in different things you may have around the house like salt, sugar, shaving green, erasable markers, sand, etc.
h. Pen Pals: let your child write to a relative or friend during the summer to keep writing skills fresh.
i. Spelling City (www.spellingcity.com) is a great site for reviewing spelling words from the year or making new spelling words your child learns over the summer.
j. Make flashcards of spelling words, instant words, letter, consonants, vowels, states and capitals, colors, blends, etc.
k. Do daily journal writing. Give your child a topic and let them free write for 5 minutes. Example topics: What are we going to do on vacation? What do we need to buy at the grocery store? What did you enjoy about your day? How are you alike/different than Mickey Mouse/Dora the Explorer/mom/dad/your teacher/your sister/brother/etc.
l. In the car, find road signs that start with the letter A, end with an E, have two words in the title, or contain a number word. Make rhyming words. Play I Spy using good descriptive vocabulary.
m. Play “Would You Rather”. Would you rather be a monkey or a giraffe? A car or a truck? A teacher or a student? President or a NBA player? Have a million dollars or be really smart? Be invisible or fly? Have no toys or have no school? Be the fastest runner or the best dancer?
n. Visit www.storylineonline.net where actors read stories that your child will love. The site also has activities to go along with each story.
7. Most importantly, keep a routine which will help your child transition easily back into school in the fall.
Have a great holiday!
Nancy Fatheree
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