Hi Ryan,
I’m sorry to hear about your district’s loss and glad that your families have someone like you committed to helping find the best ways to support students. You’re right to be proactive in finding creative ways to support your students because academic loss during the summer is a real phenomenon.
It sounds like your priority is to get help compiling meaningful activities to support literacy skills. This is, of course, going to depend on the age and skill of the learner. But, regardless of age, these activities should ideally be a continuation of the learning students have engaged in throughout the school year. This will help make practice easy and accessible for families and support the habits you’ve already helped build. It will also help prevent students from practicing things they haven’t mastered, which could result in students practicing incorrectly. In other words, now is not the ideal time to send home a new list of vocabulary words for students to learn or a worksheet for transitional words (e.g., similarly, admittedly) that haven’t been taught. Instead, we want activities that we’re pretty sure students will have a high level of success with. For example, if families of younger students have been practicing newly learned phonics skills through a take-home game during the school year, can you encourage them to continue using that same game over the summer? Maybe the game includes a gameboard, so a way to keep practice consistent, but the activity novel would be to send home a few different variations of the game “path.” Or perhaps, for older students, you’ve been providing take-home questions with the books from class for students to discuss with their caregivers to strengthen their comprehension, critical thinking, and communication skills. Can you carry this practice into the summer months? Maybe you can provide a small list of books your students may like, along with some discussion guides.
My personal bias is that less is more, because I find that it's quite easy for the list of activities to become overwhelming. I err on the side of providing generic recommendations (e.g, a list of age-appropriate podcasts, books, and audiobooks; a few learning websites; and some reminders of the importance of discussion and reading aloud) to build vocabulary and language skills because this is a high-impact practice that families can support with relatively little preparation. Then, I’m able to reach out individually to caring adults who are looking for something additional. This is particularly true for the students below grade level. Students struggle with reading for a variety of reasons, so there’s no blanket suggestion I can give you that will support all these learners. The best advice I can give is to use what you know about these students to create brief, daily practice of the skills they most need to maintain over the summer.
Although you asked about reading activities specifically, another aspect of this challenging situation is that the loss of summer programming likely affects more than just students' access to academic support. One of the things you might consider including in what you send is a connection to community resources in your area. Are there any groups helping to provide meals? Summer camps or day meet-ups? Enrichment activities or online learning? Doing the legwork to speak with local librarians, social workers, and non-profit organizations in your area or searching for programming through compiled offerings from organizations like the National Summer Learning Association could help take the load off a family looking for a summer school replacement.
Distributing resources throughout the summer could be an effective strategy. Most communication systems (emailing, mobile app messaging, etc.) have a scheduling feature that could be used to send sporadic tips, reminders, and resources. Think about how you’ve been communicating with families throughout the school year and consider if there might be a way to extend this collaboration into the summer. For example, at AIM Academy, one resource our teachers use for communication is our Family Zone, which provides resources and links throughout the school year. In the summer, the site also contains summer reading and math suggestions.
I truly empathize with the difficulty of your situation and hope this both affirms and generates ideas you have for summer support. And to those educators whose summer has already started, bookmark this article to file away after you’ve had your well-deserved time to recharge!
