Education

5 ways to beat the summer holiday slump

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(image has absolutely nothing to do with the article. It’s our wedding anniversary today, and this was my present from my husband…)

Summer holidays are great, aren’t they? I used to crave them all year long when I was teaching full-time and, although they take on a slightly different tone with 2 small (-ish) children to entertain, they are still a very welcome release after weeks of work, homework, endless nagging, managing everyone’s social schedules and the feeling that you’re running very hard just to stay in the same place.

However, 6 weeks is a long time in the life of a primary school child and it often seems like feast or famine where learning is concerned: they work very hard from September to June, then grind to a sudden halt for the duration of the summer holidays.

Now, I am definitely not an advocate of summer schools for children. I am not even very keen on private tuition over the holidays. I do believe that play and exercise and being outdoors and developing socially are just as important as more formal learning. Beating the ‘summer slump’ doesn’t need to involve sitting down at a desk, pencil in hand, nor do you need to spend any money or a great deal of time. The best way to ensure the hard work that your child and their teacher has put in over the year isn’t lost over the summer is to make learning an integral part of what you do as a family. So with that in mind, here are 5 ways to beat the summer slump:

1) Go shopping. (Go on, it’s for the good of the children, honest…!) Talk to your child about how much items cost. Ask them simple questions, depending upon their age, for example, ‘Which of these items costs more?’ (for a younger child) or ‘If I buy this item, how much change will I get from £5?’ So much of what we buy these days is paid for using cards, but try to ensure that children are given cash to use as much as possible, so that younger ones become familiar with the coins and see the ‘real-word’ uses of mathematics.

2) Talk about time. The school day is governed by time, with break, lunch and home time at set intervals, so much so that children often become lazy about reading time for themselves. One question I’m often asked at school is, ‘How long is it until break/lunchtime?’ Children have a natural curiosity about time which can be exploited: my daughter is fond of asking how many days it is until her birthday, so we have made charts together where she can tick off the days and this can lead to a chat about how many days there are in a week, weeks in a month, etc… The same idea can be used for your summer holiday: draw tick charts to count off the days, talk about different time zones if you go abroad, or just very simply ask your children to tell you the time on an analogue clock. Talk aloud about what time you are doing various activities together and how long it is until then.

3) Have a whiteboard in the kitchen/shared family space. This may be a board that you use for shopping lists, or family notices or doodling. Ours sits on our wall in our kitchen and has been an invaluable learning tool. Use it for family games of ‘hangman’ to help with spellings, draw word searches on it, write sentences with missing words to help with vocabulary development, put the occasional maths problem on it to solve together as a family. Make sure that your children see Mum and Dad learning too: get them to challenge you in this shared space.

4) Use the summer holiday time to explore books. Often, during term-time, children get stuck just reading their school book, as there’s often precious little time for anything else. If these are uninspiring (Biff, Chip, Floppy and the flippin’ magic key, anyone…?!), then it is very easy to see how they can be turned off reading at a young age. Children often say that they dislike reading when really they just haven’t found the right books yet. Use the summer holidays to explore what their interests. As a teacher, I have never been too fussed about WHAT children are reading. If they like comics, let them read comics, if they like Minecraft, let them read gaming books and magazines. Expanding their range can come later, for now, just get them reading. Use your local library and make sure that you talk to your children about what they are reading: ask them to explain the story to you, describe their favourite character, or how to get an exploding arrow (Minecraft, and we haven’t managed it yet…)

5) Do some science. Get out and explore nature. Look for bugs in their natural habitat – ladybirds always seem to be favourite here. Keep a tally chart to see how many you find. Make some observations about where they like to live. Predict what sort of creatures you’ll see on sunny days versus rainy days and test your hypothesis. Use lemons to make invisible ink, look at shadows and sunlight at different times of the day. Check out http://www.scienceboffins.co.uk, which has some great experiments.

Teaching Reading skills – fiction.

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Follow the link below to download a short activity which can be used to practise reading skills for the KS2 SATs. The questions are based on an extract from The Secret Garden.

SATs reading text 

Teaching inference starter

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This activity is one which I often used as a ‘starter’  (taking 15-20 mins) – either as an introduction to a  whole lesson looking at how to infer, or as a ‘stand alone’ starter. This can work with any year from Year 2/3 upwards, depending upon how much you intend to draw out of it.

Miss Lancaster stormed into the classroom, slamming her bag down onto the table. She glared at the students sitting in the front row, her eyes scanning them for any sign of misbehaviour.

Sitting on the end of the row, Georgia gulped nervously. Hands trembling, she fumbled in her pencil case for a pen. She kept her eyes down, hoping desperately not to catch her teacher’s attention. 

  1. Underline the verbs in the first paragraph.
  2. What impression do these verbs give us of Miss Lancaster?
  3. What can we infer about: a) what kind of teacher she is and  b) what kind of relationship she has with her students?
  4. Underline the verbs and adverbs in the second paragraph.
  5. What impression do these give us of how Georgia is feeling?
  6. What can we infer about Georgia’s feelings towards her teacher?

mind-journey

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Mind Travel

This is an exercise that I used to use a lot in years 7-11 to help children who were reluctant or struggling writers. It could work with primary aged children too, although in my experience children at this age tend to be much more enthusiastic and uninhibited writers!

I usually begin my getting the children to close their eyes and tell them that they are going to be going on a journey through their imaginations. I tell them that for the purposes of this exercise, spelling and punctuation do not matter, but instead they should just concentrate upon getting their ideas down on paper. I then read through each section in turn, giving the children time to write between each one. They should leave 3-4 lines between each section.

This provides plenty of opportunity for follow-up lessons on descriptive language, grammar and punctuation and peer assessment skills. However, it is important that children are able to write freely in this first lesson, without barriers/fears/worries about getting things ‘wrong’ preventing them.

You are going to be going on a journey through your mind. You will describe to me what you can see, hear, taste and feel. Close your eyes if it helps you to imagine each part of your journey more clearly, and once you can see the images in your mind, begin to write.

  1. The path

Imagine yourself at the start of a journey. A path stretches in front of you. Imagine what you can see. You may like to think about:

*what is the path made of? (sand, rocks, stone, wood)

*what can you see on either side of the path? (what is the surrounding area like? woods/beach/mountains/cityscape)

  1. Water

You have begun your journey down your path. A short way ahead of you, you notice some water blocking your way. Describe the water and how you manage to cross it. You may like to think about:

*How big is the water? (is it a puddle, stream, lake, river, sea?)

*How will you cross it? (bridge/boat/rope swing)

  1. Key

You have successfully crossed the river and continued your journey. A short way ahead of you on the path, you see something glinting in the sunlight. As you get closer, you realise that it is a key. You walk towards the key and pick it up. Describe what the key looks like and how it feels. You may like to think about:

*How big is the key? (is it small, like a key to a padlock, or big, like a key to a castle door?)

*Is it old or new? (is it worn down, rusty and old, or shiny and new?)

*How does the key feel in your hand? (sharp/smooth/hot/cold?)

  1. The house

You carry on your journey and notice a building ahead of you, just to one side of the path. As you draw closer, you realise that it is a house. You walk towards it and look in through one of the windows. Describe the house and what you see when you look inside. You may like to think about:

*Does the house look lived in, or is it derelict and abandoned?

*What material is it made of? (stone, wood, bricks?)

*What do you see when you look inside? (which room are you looking into/is there any furniture/are there any occupants?)

  1. The wall

You walk on past the house and continue your journey. Way ahead of you, in the distance, you see a huge wall, extending as far as your eyes can see across your path, completely blocking your way. There is no way over it, under it or through it. However, there is a small gap in the wall, which allows you a glimpse of what lie on the other side of it. You realise that this is the ebnd of your journey. Describe the wall and what you see when you look through the gap to the other side. YHou may like to think about:

*What is the wall made of? (stone/brick/wood/metal?)

*How does it feel to the touch?

*Use your imagination to think what you might glimpse on the other side of the wall. Try to be really creative.

Top tips to encourage reluctant young readers

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1. Don’t make them read

Granted, this sounds a little strange, but reluctant readers are often readers who are lacking in confidence. They may be early readers who have never really got off the starting blocks, or they may be slightly older readers who have told themselves – or been told at some stage – that they are not ‘good’ at reading. They soon stop attempting to read because they have already predicted their own failure. There is little more painful – educationally speaking – than sitting next to a child you are meant to be ‘hearing’ read and watching them struggle to sound out every word. If this is the case with your child/student, then stop. Go back and don’t make them read for a while: read to them instead, letting them see the words on the page, allowing them to focus upon the joy of reading a story, which is where a life-long love of books is really born. They need to re-engage before they can begin again to read.

2. Start with bite-size chunks

When my son was in reception class and going through a particularly resistant phase with reading his school books, I had to try to figure out a way to work around it. He had passed the early stage where his books consisted of 5 pages of ‘Tap, tap, tap!’ ‘Pat, pat, pat!’ and had realised that 24 pages of book with a proper story was going to require a little more effort on his part…Instead of insisting that he always read his school book when we were having our reading time at home, I would sometimes write him a couple of silly sentences which he liked to read, such as, ‘The clouds are made of cheese.’ The sillier the better, really! If he had a particular word he had to learn that week I could also incorporate that into a sentence and it seemed like a lot less of a chore than reading a whole book.

3. Let them read anything (well, within reason…)

The list is really endless here, but the point is that everything counts as reading: the back of cereal packets at breakfast time, road signs, house names,  ‘for sale’ signs on your way to school, ‘no parking’ signs. Any type of book counts too: some children find non-fiction far more appealing, so go with what they like and encourage them in any interests that they have. My 6 year old is currently stuck in the middle of a ‘Dr. Who’ phase and his favourite book is a compendium of monsters, which he can often be found poring over, rating each monster on their strength or speed or ‘scariness’ factor. As adults we read for pleasure, but we often forget that children’s reading should be just the same.

4. Let them write and read  

This is another strategy that worked well with us. We put up a large whiteboard in our kitchen and let the children write on it. They could write anything that they wanted to, but they had to read it back to us. Of course they didn’t spell the words correctly initially, but that didn’t matter. We also wrote words on the board and they read them back to us. Then we progressed to sentences and pretty soon they were reading those too. You can also – if you have a magnetic board – buy the first 100 words as magnets and stick them up there for your children to find and play around with. Whatever you do, don’t drill them on the words: just leave them to play and explore and soon they’ll be creating whole sentences and proudly showing them to you.

5. Work out what kinds of reading strategies they use

When I was at school, I’m pretty sure we followed the ‘look and say’ method of learning to read, but today it’s all about phonics. In itself, it’s a mixed method approach anyway – as we all know how ‘un-phonetic’ our spelling system is – and some words (‘tricky words’) just have to be learned by sight the way most of my generation would be familiar with. However, this – like any method – does not work best for all children. Some find it a real struggle to blend individual sounds into words and it can hold back their early reading – and confidence – considerably if this is the sole method that is relied upon. Some children are just more natural ‘sight readers’ – they see the whole word and learn it by remembering it by sight, rather than by blending the sounds together. Watch and see how your child seems to learn best and discuss it with their teacher. Most schools – whilst using phonics as their main method of teaching early reading – are willing to be flexible and every good teacher sees their students as individuals.

 

‘There is no such thing as a child who hates to read; there are only children who have not found the right book.’ Frank Serafini.