Avoid the Summer Slide 

(Except for the Playground)
by Caryn Azer

 

My students love to complete their school/homework. They'll work anywhere, even the beach! Where is your favorite place to read or complete your assignments? No matter what type of work you need to do, the beach or other outdoor spaces can provide a peaceful environment or inspiration for writing. Outdoor spaces in summer can provide excellent opportunities for practicing reading, spelling, and even math practice. 

 

Beach Blanket Bingo

At the beach, you can do a variety of multi-sensory activities:

  • Read a book or magazine. 
  • Keep a log of the pages you read each day, and/or a log of the books you read. Set a goal for yourself for how many books you can read each week, month, or for the summer. 
  • Keep a journal of book summaries or opinions about each book. 
  • Create a bingo game board, Tic-Tac-Toe, or scavenger hunt with various objects you might find at the beach, such as: seashells, sea glass, specific colors of umbrellas, kites, beach balls, sand castles, picnic baskets, seagulls.
  • Write a descriptive paragraph about the beach using your 5 senses. 
  • Practice writing letters, words, numbers, shapes, in the sand. Have someone write a letter in the sand. Identify the grapheme or letter and its phoneme or sound. Have someone give you a sound and write the letter in the sand. 
  • Write a story with the beach as the setting. Maybe you will be the main character, maybe you’ll be a superhero. 
  • Write a step by step guide to building a sand castle. Be sure to use words such as, first, second, then, and next. 
  • Write a story about the sand castle you built. Maybe a little fairy family lives in the castle. 
  • Keep a journal about each time you visit the beach. 
  • Keep track of the temperature each time you go to the beach. At the end of the summer, organize them in order from coolest to hottest. 
  • Write letters on a beach ball to toss to a friend. The side that faces up…name the letter, the sound, or a word that begins or ends with that sound. 
  • Practice reading red words (high-frequency words). Write them on a beach ball. 
  • Write numbers on the beach ball. Name the number, and/or count up to the number that faces up. Skip count by that number. 
  • Count seashells or make patterns.  

 

Right At Home

Outdoor learning doesn’t have to be limited to the beach. Your backyard or a park can also provide opportunities for learning. Many of the activities you can do at the beach, can be done right at home. Write in the sandbox - letters, words, and numbers - write with your finger or a stick.  Finding objects in nature, such as, leaves, rocks, and  sticks, to count or make patterns with. You can even sort them. Use your five senses to list what you can hear, see, smell, touch, but please leave taste to a snack from inside your house!

Other activities might include:

  • While bouncing a ball, or jumping rope, count the number of bounces or jumps. Count by ones or skip count. With each bounce or jump, spell a word. 
  • Write letters, numbers, word families, or high frequency words using water and a paintbrush, or sidewalk chalk on the side of a fence or the pavement. 
  • Draw a number line. Use large dice to roll and hop while counting to the number rolled. 
  • Count how many times you go back and forth on a swing, or up and down with a friend on a seesaw. 
  • Sit outside and read books. 
  • Write a story about your outside adventures, or keep a daily journal of what you do outside. 
  • Count the number of steps up to the slide. Count by 1’s, 2’s, 5’s, 10’s. 
  • Slide toy cars down the slide to see which can go faster. 
  • If you have a water table, fill it with shaving cream for writing letters and words. 
  • For kids working on multi-syllabic words, writing in sand, dirt, or sidewalk chalk, can then use sticks to practice syllable division rules, and/or underlining roots, suffixes, and prefixes.

There are so many fun and exciting outdoor opportunities to practice early learning skills. It’s also a fabulous chance for fresh air and exercise. Many of the activities can be extended for older kids, during the summer. The great thing about these activities is that they don’t have to break the bank! 

Classes

Many of these ideas are lessons and classes I use with or teach my students. I provide individualized, specialized, interventions and small group classes for students with dyslexia, dyscalculia, language disorders. Classes are based on the principles of the Science of Reading, Structured Literacy, Orton-Gillingham, and multi-sensory math. I also have supplemental resources for sale. Resources reflect these principles as well.

Lessons are:

  • Structured 
  • Sequential 
  • Incremental
  • Cumulative 
  • Flexible  
  • Multi-sensory
  • Language-Based 
  • Individualized