How to Create a Summer Learning Workbook
A 2010 article in the "Johns Hopkins University School of Education Journal" states that "Without ongoing opportunities to learn and practice essential skills, kids fall behind on measures of academic achievement over the summer months." Such conclusions have informed the National Summer Learning Association's recommendation that kids engage in educational activities during the summer. Help keep your child's mind sharp during the summer by providing her with books to read, interesting experiments to try and practice workbooks you can make yourself. Regularly using the workbooks can help to reinforce the skills she's already learned and begin preparing her for the next grade.
Things You'll Need
- Grade-appropriate online and print teaching materials
- Plain paper
- Copier or printer
- Staples
- Hole punch
- Loose-leaf binder
- Dividers
Instructions
Ask your child's current teacher to recommend some skill sets your child should review or practice over the summer in preparation for the next school year. Ask for ideas about the types of exercises and worksheets that might be useful toward that end. Try to talk to a teacher in the child's next grade to get her recommendations of skills your child can begin learning for the coming school year. Ask both teachers for copies of workbook pages or to direct you to websites or educational resources where you can find appropriate learning materials in math, science, language skills and social studies. Make copies of the desired worksheets or create your own. Keep the activity sheets for each subject together and sort them into sequentially more challenging exercises for your child to work on over the summer. Start with the simpler activities in each subject to review key points from the grade your child just completed, then gradually add more complex activities or exercises to begin introducing the concepts she'll face in the coming year. Incorporate nontraditional or fun activities into the learning to keep your child from getting bored. For example, create worksheets tied to a fun zoo outing -- your child can count how many animals he sees of a certain type and make a table or pie chart to test his math skills. Make anagrams of the animals' names to help your child with spelling. Let your child draw the animals' habitats and label key elements for a related science lesson. Encourage summer fitness activities as well by creating math pages where your child can track his activities, such as time spent running, how many times he jumped rope each week or how many hits he gets in baseball. Put the pages into a single workbook or create a separate workbook for each subject. The simplest approach is to staple the pages together along the left margin. Another good option is to punch holes along the left side of each page with a three-hole punch and organize them in a loose-leaf binder. Separate each subject by using dividers or different colors of paper. The binder approach also allows you to add new activity pages as desired and makes it easy for kids to add note paper or scratch paper for figuring out problems as needed. Make a colorful cover for the workbook and leave a space for your child to write her name on it. For younger children, leave spaces for completion or praise stickers on the worksheets; older children might enjoy checking off each completed page or lesson on a chart in the workbook to track their progress.
