how to sneak in a little summer learning

Summertime is every child’s favorite time of year. No kid likes to think about school during summer vacation, but how do you incorporate some type of learning to ensure that they don’t absolutely forget everything they learned throughout the whole school year?  I have a few ideas that work for us to make sure that they at least practice spelling, reading, and writing. I felt like if I didn’t think of something their brain cells would shrivel up and die, never to be seen again. I was afraid their teacher would punish and hate me if I sent them to school again having to start over from scratch.  So since I have children in almost every level this year; elementary, middle, and high I wanted to get creative with their summer assignments.  For the older children an idea I had was to make them write a summer journal, they don’t have to write a lot just as long as they write at least one entry every day.  There are a few rules they must follow. They have to pay attention to punctuation, spelling, and grammar. If it doesn’t make sense I make them rewrite it, so yeah I do hold them accountable.  I read their entries, and it’s quite entertaining for me too, and that’s a plus.
For the younger two, one is six the other three I had an awesome idea, which I wished I’d thought of for the older ones when they were little. I messaged a couple of friends on Facebook that have little girls the same ages, one lives in Savannah the other in Nevada, and asked if they would like our little girls to be pen pals! My six year old absolutely loves writing letters to a friend who lives so far away, and really focuses on writing neatly. She spends almost an hour on the letters each time she writes. Her sister practices drawing and a different letter of the alphabet each time. Both girls are always so excited to see the mail man each day, and I am proud to see them learning the lost art of letter writing.
It doesn’t take much to do something at least once daily to exercise their little minds. My older kids groaned at the idea at first, but over time they enjoyed the creative writing. We’ll have some great stories to read in years to come. My summer has been much more amusing after reading all the things my crazy kids have put on paper. So the next time you have to step in front of the TV or turn off the X-box to get your son to answer you, think about throwing a summer writing journal at his head instead and require him to write about why he loves that game so much. His new teacher might just thank you for it. *disclaimer I originally published this in my column in the Walton Tribune  7/3/2013