We all know kids lose a lot of information over the summer. Every fall, teachers play catch up, reteaching the same thing another teacher went over just months before. But there's a way to prevent that -- by TEACHING your child over the summer. They will be ahead of other students and will not lose information. This is part of the reason why a lot of homeschool students graduate early...our kids don't have the chance to lose information.
That being said, here's my plan (which is pretty lax in my opinion) to make sure my older nieces are ahead of the class this fall.
Technology - Step away from the smart phones. Not only do they expose children to all sorts of stuff you don't want them watching/seeing, they are a HUGE TIME WASTER! 2 hours on a gaming app but can't spend 20 minutes reading? I THINK NOT! I am taking away all the small devices, including laptops, and replacing them with this kid friendly cell phone and 1 desktop computer. It only has texting and calling, a calculator, and other basic features like that. (Disclosure: This is a sponsored post with Techless who makes the phone.) **Also disclosure: I was the one who brought little devices for my nieces to use, and found out it was a bad idea!
If you would like a lesson plan to go along with teaching kids how to use a cell phone, check out this one that I made:
Math - TARGET SKILLS that are the most important in the grade the child is in. Here are the most important skills for the middle grades. Please check back in a few hours for this chart if you are seeing this message.
Reading- Perseverance stories, overcoming adversity, coming of age novels. I am just going to list the ones here we will actually read instead of listing a hundred books for you to search through.
10th Grader - First they Killed my Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by
Loung Ung, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins (This will be a re-read for us)
8th Grader - Dear Martin by Nic Stone; My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George;
6th Grader - The Mighty Miss Malone by Christopher Paul Curtis; Moon over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool
Social Studies - The 8th and 10th grader will be studying African-American History from 1500 - 1700. The 6th grader will be doing African studies 1 which covers West Africa from ancient times to around 1400s in our household.
Science - We will be doing two separate "tasks" - one middle, one high school. Scroll down to see them after clicking here: https://www.nextgenscience.org/classroom-sample-assessment-tasks
Hi, this was a really helpful post, thank you. I’m in the UK and I’m finding it difficult to teach my 5 year and 8 year old history. In terms of black history all we have is colonialism. I’m Ghanaian and I want my daughters to learn African history. So when you said you will be teaching African Studies to your younger students I was intrigued. I’d be grateful if you could let me know what resources you will be using to teach this. Thank you, Akos.