As a teacher, the “summer slide” is always one of my fears. We work so hard for ten months out of the year to get our kindergarteners reading, writing, adding, and subtracting. And many times, our students do not keep up with their newfound skills over the summer. This makes for a backward “slide” in reading levels and academic abilities.
And this year, I anticipate it being even worse. The “COVID slide” is five months of missed classroom instruction; much more than the typical two months of summer.
So to provide my students and their families with meaningful summer activities, I created my Summer Kindergarten Handbook. It includes 11 essential end-of-kindergarten skills to continue practicing during the summer. In the beginning of each section, I included a parent instruction page that explains the skill, why it is important, how to practice it, and extra tips to make learning fun. The skills included are: reading, finding just right books, sight words (Fry 101-200 words), writing sentences, digraphs, long vowels, reading CVC words, nonsense word fluency, addition fluency, subtraction fluency, and numbers to 120.
I printed these books, bound them, and delivered them to my students in a fun “summer swag bag” filled with various other fun things like Play Doh, bubbles, and books.
And this year, I had a lot of students that were loving writing at home, so I also created some Creative Writing Prompts to send home in addition to the handbook. I added this to my summer HyperDoc for parents to print and use as they wish, along with my FREE Summer Reading Log for extra reading motivation.
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