Combating the Summer Slide
As the summer break quickly approaches in the Northeast I have come across various articles focusing on summer learning loss and the negative impact that time off has on students. In 2010 Time Magazine published an article that clearly articulated The Case Against Summer Vacation. Even though there is a great deal of research on the loss of learning that occurs during the summer I am perplexed by the fact that many schools and parents are not doing more to prevent this. Here is a video that shares some stark statistics as well as a few great strategies that parents can utilize at home.
As a district we have always assigned summer readings (view this years assignment here). This year we are taking it a step further as we have developed assignments in both Language Arts and Mathematics to lessen the summer slide while retaining a focus on specific skills and concepts learned throughout the past school year. The math assignments developed by my teachers can be found on our Math Department web page. When I reminded the students of their summer assignments at our academic awards ceremony yesterday many parents in attendance began to clap and cheer. This provided some nice validation in terms of our shift towards implementing summer learning assignments.
As a result of a recent $10,000 donation to New Milford High School all students in grades 9-11 have access
