Summer Activities for Family Promote Learning, Fun

Newswise — School is out, but that doesn’t mean learning should take a break for the summer – especially when numerous studies show learning that takes place outside school during a child’s early years has great influence on academic achievement later in life.

It also doesn’t mean that children should be restricted to sitting at a desk with a textbook.

The National Center for Family Literacy has created fun lessons that use the dramatic arts to boost learning during the summer break. Dancing, writing poetry, producing a talent show, creating plays – all of these activities can build vocabulary, reading, writing and spelling skills.

“Parents are a child’s first and most important teacher,” said Sharon Darling, president & CEO of the National Center for Family Literacy. “At no time is that role more crucial than during the summer. There are easy and fun ways to spend time as a family and increase learning.”

NCFL has developed a unique summer enrichment curriculum designed for community programs and literacy partners. It also is ideally suited for individual families, Darling said.

Originally piloted at Salvation Army Corps and Boys & Girls Clubs sites in Louisville, Ky., and Atlanta, Summer Learning Summer Fun is an enrichment program that provides fun research-based learning experiences for children ages six through 15. The goal of the program is to bridge the summer learning gap children often experience between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next.

Of the children who participated in the first year of the summer curriculum program, 52 percent improved one-half to two reading grade levels during the summer months. This is particularly impressive since many summer programs are considered successful when students are able to simply maintain reading grade level scores—showing no loss and making no gains.

Extending learning throughout the summer is particularly important to combating the achievement gap because studies that much of this gap can be traced to the so-called summer slide.

The Summer Fun Summer Learning community enrichment program provides meaningful educational activities during the summer months that research has proven will boost learning. Parents are invited and encouraged to attend an end-of-the-week event that highlights the activities such as skits, talent shows, spelling bees, and more, in which their child participated.

“The Summer Fun Summer Learning curriculum is the most golden opportunity you have for a summer enrichment program,” said Captain Karen Twinney, who works at the Salvation Army in the Portland neighborhood of Louisville, Ky. “As Salvation Army officers, we have been doing day camps for a long time. This program is wonderful because what it does is give you a plan for each week with a different dramatic arts theme. It really lays out a plan of how to really be teaching kids something all centered around fun, and they don’t realize it. When we did the program last summer, we noticed that the kids who attended the whole summer program didn’t have the summer slide.”

The curriculum guide and student journal are available for free download at NCFL’s website. They include step-by-step instructional units in the dramatic arts (drama and plays, dance, poetry, dramatic and story reading, and music). Activities were created as a result of scientifically based reading research and are provided for a five-week period.

Each unit includes daily instructional activities blocked in two hour periods. These tools and others, which are available for free as a result of funding from The UPS Foundation can be found at http://www.famlit.org/community-literacy.

The National Center for Family Literacy, the worldwide leader in family literacy, has raised more than $115 million for literacy efforts since its founding in 1989. More than 1 million families have made positive educational and economic gains as a result of NCFL’s work, which includes training more than 150,000 teachers and thousands of volunteers. For more information, visit http://www.famlit.org.