If this past June’s report card didn’t look as good as you had wished, you can help your child maintain math and language skills over the summer.

     You can help your child learn by involving him/her is real-life hands on learning at home.

     The first way you can help your child is to have the two of you do some cooking or baking.  Cookbooks and measuring cups provide a good opportunity for learning fractions.  Cookbooks have the measurements and the measuring cups are good hands on tools, often labeled with the fractions.  Your child will be able to see that 1 cup is greater than 1/2, which is greater than 1/3 and so on.  You can teach your child how to add fractions by adding the contents in the measuring cups.

     Food shopping is another great way to learn math skills.  When you take your child to the supermarket, you can look at food prices and compare them.  This strategy of comparing decimals and whole numbers is an important math skill.  After you have paid for your groceries, you can have your younger child categorize the foods on the bill.  Your older child can round the decimal prices to whole numbers (e.g. %7.89 could be rounded to $8.00) to see if the food bill was correct.  This can also be done after dinner at the restaurant.

     Instead of throwing away all those flyers (and perhaps sometimes coupons), you can use them to show your child how to compare prices and determine which flyer has a better sale.  Again, this skill requires estimating, rounding, and adding.

     Board games are great educational tools.  Boggle and Scrabble are two great choices.  Scrabble is an obvious winner with regards to learning spelling and vocabulary.  Allow your child to use a dictionary.  This will help him/her improve vocabulary, learn correct spelling, learn how to use a dictionary, and boost his/her confidence.  I let my kids use a thesaurus and if they can come up with a synonym I give them extra points.

     You can also take out a deck of cards to teach math.  War is a great game to play with young children.  Take out the face cards and have your child determine who wins each round.  This will force your child to look at the two cards and compare the numbers.

  Finally, are you planning on doing any renovations around the house?  If so, measuring tapes are excellent tools for learning math skills.  Your child can measure length using fractions (e.g. 5 ⅜) and whole numbers.  You can also teach your child how to find the perimeter or area of a specific space.

  There are many more ways that you can prevent your child from losing math skills over the summer if you are creative.  It is well known that the best learning is done when it applies to real life.

admin Homeschooling decimals, fractions, learning, spelling, summer

     I see grammar the same way I see addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.  Without these 4 math skills, a student would be lost in almost every area of math!  Think about it.  How is a student going to find common denominators of fractions, convert ratios to percentages, calculate angles, and so on if he doesn’t have the essential building blocks for mathematics? 

     Well, grammar is the same!!!!  Without the basic fundamentals of writing a proper sentence, using the correct prepositional phrase, or following appropriate spelling rules, how is a child going to express his thoughts?  Sure, there’s more to writing than grammar (i.e. creating a report, writing a procedure…) but how is the student going to put it all together in a coherent manner?

     I’ve seen students in the past who can easily organize a report, use paragraphs, an introduction, and state a conclusion.  And yes, they’ve used Microsoft spell checker.  But I have also helped edit their rough copies, and I have to tell you, many students don’t have the skills needed to write a paragraph full of coherent sentences.  I’m certainly not blaming the school system  nor am I blaming the parents.  Perhaps I’m finding fault with trends (and who sets the trends you may ask).  There are always ebbs and flows in education systems. 

     I remember reading about a great writing program from Australia (which I have used in classrooms in the past and I must say it was quite effective), but the authors did not put any emphasis on grammar (it’s understandable because they were focusing on other writing skills).  What I’m trying to say is that parents and educators must not forget the important ‘building blocks’ of written language.  Just as a student should master his/her multiplication tables in order to learn about measuring volume, he/she must also master grammar in order to become a proficient writer.

    (Hopefully you won’t find any grammar mistakes in this blog entry!)

admin Writing grammar, spelling