Get Ready for Summer! Ideas for Teachers to Share with Families

Ideas for active summer learning:

1.Offer recommendations for active learning experiences.

Check with your local department of parks and recreation about camps and other activities. Find out what exhibits, events, or concerts are happening in your town over the summer. Create a directory or calendar of local summer learning fun to share with your students and their families. (Be sure to note any costs involved.)

2.Encourage parents to build reading and writing into everyday activities.

Some ideas to pass along: (1) watching TV with the sound off and closed captioning on, (2) reading directions for how to play a new game, or (3) helping with meals by writing up a grocery list, finding things in the grocery store, and reading the recipe aloud for mom or dad during cooking time. 

3.Summer trading cards.

Kids can dive deeper into summer reading by exploring characters with the Trading Cards activity from Read-Write-Think, which provides students with the opportunity to expand their understanding of the reading by creating new story lines and characters. A nifty Trading Card interactive tool provides additional support.

4.Encourage writing.

Give each of your students a stamped, addressed postcard so they can write to you about their summer adventures. Or recycle school notebooks and paper into summer journals or scrapbooks. Another way to engage young writers is to encourage your students to spend some time researching and writing community stories — not only does it build research and writing skills, but helps kids develop a deeper sense of place. Find more good summer writing ideas from Start with a Book: keep a nature journal, create a poetry share a recipe, or keep a scrapbook of reviews of summer adventures.

5.Kids blog!

Arrange for a safe, closed community so that your students can blog over the summer. Edublogs and Kidblog offer teachers and students free blog space and appropriate security. Free, disposable e-mail accounts are available at Mailinator. Students can create an account there, use the address long enough to establish the blog and password, and then abandon it.

6.Be an active citizen.

Kids who participate in community service activities gain not only new skills but self-confidence and self-esteem. Help them zoom into action! This tool from Youth Service America can help you identify youth project ideas. Volunteer Match offers a searchable database of volunteer options for kids.

Citizen Kid is a collection of books that inform children about the world and inspire them to be better global citizens. The U.S. Department of Education published Helping Your Child Become a Responsible Citizen with activities for elementary school kids.

7.Read about your world.

Newsela builds nonfiction literacy and awareness of world events by providing access to hundreds of fresh news articles (you can filter by grade). Other good sources of quality nonfiction include Time for Kids online and many children’s magazines offered by Cricket Media, National Geographic, and other publishers.

The bloggers on The Uncommon Corps are enthusiastic champions of nonfiction literature for kids and young adults, and offer many ideas for integrating nonfiction into your reading diet. For more book ideas to share with parents, check out the Orbis Pictus Award winners — outstanding nonfiction for children, presented by the National Council of Teachers of English. Share these tip sheets with parents (available in English and Spanish): Getting the Most Out of Nonfiction Reading Time and How to Read Nonfiction Text. And don’t forget to check out our Nonfiction for Kids section.

8.Active bodies.-Active minds.

From the American Library Association, I love libraries has suggestions for staying fit and having fun that start at your local library.

9.Get into geocaching.

Everyone loves a scavenger hunt! Get in on the latest outdoor craze with geocaching, where families search for hidden “caches” or containers using handheld GPS tools (or a GPS app on your smart phone). Try a variation on geocaching called earth caching where you seek out and learn about unique geologic features. Find more details about geocaching plus links to geocaching websites in this article from the School Family website, Geocaching 101: Family Fun for All, in Every Season. Or follow one young family on their geocaching adventure: Beginner’s Guide to Geocaching with Kids.

10.Watch a garden grow

Children are encouraged to write questions and observations in a summer garden journal. Or check out the Kids Gardening website for lots of great ideas and resources for family (and school) gardening. You can also browse the hands-on activities on our summer site, Start with a Book, in the section Nature: Our Green World.

11.Make cool things.

Find loads of hands-on activities at Start with a Book. Just choose from one of 24 topics (art, music, dinosaurs, bugs, detectives, flight, sports, stars, planets and the night sky … and more) and start exploring.

12.Help parents plan ahead for fall.

Work with the teachers a grade level above to develop a short list of what their new students have to look forward to when they return to school. For example, if rising third graders will be studying ancient cultures, suggest that parents check out educational TV, movies, or local museums that can provide valuable background information on that topic.

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