Led by the National Summer Learning Association (NSLA), National Summer Learning Week is a celebration dedicated to elevating the importance of keeping kids learning, safe, and healthy every summer, ensuring they return to school ready to succeed in the year. A new resource this year is DiscoverSummer.org, a tool to help families and caregivers discover summer programs, both in-person and virtual, right in their community.
NSLA suggests summer activities for children, students, and families including STEM, health and wellness, arts and crafts, and literacy. Check out these NCTE and ReadWriteThink.org tied to these summer learning ideas.
STEM
This book features educators in construction trades, English, math, and multidisciplinary teams who have created empowering disciplinary classrooms and projects that allow students to gain new identities as makers and doers.
Health and Wellness
This minilesson encourages children to seek out and appropriately react to nutrition labels and to make healthy food choices, integrating science, math, health, and literacy.
Arts and Crafts
From sticks and leaves to flowers and dirt, kids love to explore the outdoors. In this activity, children examine the contents of their yards or playgrounds for materials that they can incorporate into an art project. When finished creating, they can write “artist’s statements” about their pieces and hang them up on clotheslines, fences, or porches for an outdoor art gallery walk.
Literacy
Libraries are magical places. Visitors can learn about far-away lands, find out how to do new things, follow the fantastic adventures of fictional and real-life heroes, and even solve mysteries and find the answers to burning questions. With a child, explore the many free programs and resources available in a local or online library to find out ways to keep active all summer long.
What are your plans for summer learning? Post on social media and tag @ncte!
It is the policy of NCTE in all publications, including the Literacy & NCTE blog, to provide a forum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teaching of English and the language arts. Publicity accorded to any particular point of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the Board of Directors, the staff, or the membership at large, except in announcements of policy, where such endorsement is clearly specified.
Lisa Fink is an NCTE Staff Member, a former elementary teacher, and a current university instructor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She can be reached on Twitter @fink_girl.