
Our team sorts through all blog submissions to place them in the categories they fit the most - meaning it's never been simpler to gain advice and new knowledge for topics most important for you. This is why we have created this straight-forward guide to help you navigate our system.
And there you have it! Now your collection of blogs are catered to your chosen topics and are ready for you to explore. Plus, if you frequently return to the same categories you can bookmark your current URL and we will save your choices on return. Happy Reading!
If there’s one thing that most school children can be reliably predicted to look forward to, it’s the summer holidays. You can be the most eager and diligent student it’s possible to be, but the longest holiday of the year has much appeal. Unfortunately for parents, guardians and teachers, this is also the central issue of a knotty problem. Because the six weeks off from school is, well, six weeks that children aren’t doing schoolwork. Certainly, no one is denying that it’s important that people get to have breaks from work. Burnout can be a serious problem after all.
However, as any teacher can tell you, students coming back from the summer holidays are often not at the top of their game as far as academics go. Knowledge and skills they gained in the previous school year can be lost to a degree. This is known as summer learning loss, and it’s what can happen when students spend six weeks not doing anything academic. So this leaves parents and guardians with a problem that feels like a bit of a tightrope to walk. How do you prevent (or at least limit) summer learning loss for young children without robbing them of their holiday?
Fortunately, once you change your perspective slightly, this becomes a much more manageable problem. The structure of formal education can give the impression that learning has to be ‘work’. So it’s easy to forget that the earliest way that children start to learn is through play. And there are different ways to approach this, depending on what you’re aiming for. If you simply want your children to do something other than sit in front of the TV all summer, there are plenty of fun activities you can do with them outdoors. These experiences will not only engage them more actively than watching TV, but will help them be more physically active. If you’re looking for a quiet activity indoors which can serve as an alternative to TV, encouraging your child to read is an activity with many mental benefits, including increased focus and ability to visualize.
On the other hand, perhaps you’re looking for options which are more specifically focused on different aspects of the school curriculum. If you’re looking for a way to refresh and reinforce material learned in school, there may be a limit to how much of this you can cover via games and outdoor activities. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t make going over school material less dry and more engaging. There are plenty of activity booklets for subjects like English and Maths which can make the ‘work’ seem more of a fun activity. Not that this is to say that all the lessons of the curriculum need to be covered via sitting down and writing.
Science is an excellent topic to go over during the summer holidays due to the practical side of it. By engaging your children in practical science experiments, you have a way to engage them in learning in a way that they’ll find entertaining. And it also provides a great opportunity to help increase your child’s interest and confidence in science-based lessons.
Summer learning loss is something which, by definition, teachers are less equipped to deal with than parents or guardians. After all, generally speaking, children don’t see their teachers much over the holidays. And, if they do, it’s considered poor form to try and hand out assignments to do. But that doesn’t mean teachers can’t end the school year in a way that encourages summer learning. While spending the last few lessons of the year watching films is certainly one option, why not give them some puzzles and activities to test themselves on?
In the end, there’s no one perfect way to lessen summer learning loss; it’s simply a matter of picking the methods which work best for your child and their situation.
The author
Read more
Read more
Read more
Read more
Read more
Read more
Read more
Read more
Operoo is a school operations and productivity platform. We help thousands of schools and trusts to eliminate slow, expensive and repetitive tasks. Operoo helps schools streamline and digitise processes, drastically reducing the associated costs: From student pre-admissions, permission forms, payments, and school trips; to medical information and emergency contacts, incident reporting, staff agreements, and more in over 100 languages.
Unify is an online sales and marketing tool that allows users to create tailored personalised documents in moments.
ImpactEd's mission is to improve pupil outcomes by helping schools understand what is and isn’t working in their specific context. We are a non-profit organisation, and through hands-on partnership and our digital platform, we support schools to understand the impact of programmes they run and make monitoring and evaluation easy.
https://www.utility-aid.co.uk/
There’s nothing special about the energy we sell. In fact, it’s exactly the same energy as all our competitors provide. But there is something special about the way we do it. Where others complicate the process, we simplify it. Where others confuse customers with hidden terms, we’re an open book. And where others do all they can to make as much money from their customers as possible, we do all we can to make as little. Everything we do, we do it differently. Our customers are a privilege. One we’ll never take advantage of.
Securus provide market-leading monitoring solutions to safeguard students on ALL devices both online and offline. We also offer a full monitoring service, where we carry out the monitoring on behalf of the school, freeing up valuable staff resources. From the smallest school to large MAT groups, Securus offers safeguarding protection for all!
Vivify partners with schools across the country to hire out their facilities outside of school hours to enable them to generate much needed revenue that can be invested back into their facilities, teachers, and student experience. Opening up school facilities for communities to get together can improve mental and physical wellbeing, boost confidence, tackle loneliness and help people feel more positive about life.
As European leaders of Time Management Solutions, Bodet offer Lockdown, Clock, Bell & PA Systems. Harmonys, our five-in-one IP/PoE Bell System, provides a unique customisable lockdown or panic alarm alert. Melodys, a Wireless Bell System, is useful where wiring can be difficult.
Robotical makes Marty the Robot - a walking, dancing coding robot that makes programming fun and engaging for learners as young as 5. Our robots come with a full Learning Platform that has complete teaching resources, to make lesson planning a breeze.