Ideas to Keep San Diego Students Off The 'Summer Slide'

Teachers said they see it every ball. Just come back from summer vacation and lose ground. Nothing they can't make up but enough to slow kids down when they should be revving up for a brand school year. Educators called the summer slide. Just as easy as it is for students to slide backwards during vacation, teachers say there are many easy interesting and free ways for parents to encourage their kids to keep their brains and skills active. She is learning and leadership division with sonic -- San Diego office of education. Alesia butters its professional learning research coordinator with integrated technology office of education will come. Jessica, how does the summer slide show up in classrooms in the fall? Typically when teachers are sitting at the classrooms they think about lessons they need to teach for the new school year and I know in that first week of school out often get teachers saying we have so much ground to cover we had to make a some time lost and we need to backup before we get moving apart. Is it primarily reading skills or math skills or what is it? It can be a little of both. We want to see students able to jump in at that grade level and continue moving forward and typically it's a lack of practice that will have him aside a little bit. This socioeconomic factor as well. If they don't have the experience is available to them or to stay intellectually stimulated, that can happen. Is that because well-to-do kids may go to Yes. There are very expensive camps. Other different types of summer slide does it affect different age groups? Yes. A lot of it can include technology. Parents see their children on video games and think my child won't lose that ecological edge. It's definitely there if students aren't utilizing technology in an academic fashion. What do teachers have to do to make up the lost ground? How far back which you say it puts things? It depends on the groups of students coming in. Usually there will be quite a few reading lessons that will be held to get kids in various levels of reading caught up with various skills they need for that grade level. A lot of times the map program may not begin right away because teachers may think they need kids to rehearse various skills before they move forward. Alesia, other some pretty easy methods to counteract it? As you mentioned earlier, they involve technology. I like to visit it so.com website. That has math problems for grade level for A lot of parents we use that as a tool to say they're going to do four or five math problems before you get that fun screen time. Is also things using or reading such as histogram. One idea like to use with my own children is with histogram, they are documenting their summer activities on histogram. They do writeups with them. For parents who don't want their students to put their faces on histogram, they can open account with their pets or stuff animal into an adventure with those animals on histogram that way. They can to little writeups and it's really fun. Keeps them engaged and social. It keeps the writing and technological skills up. With a little creativity, parents can help their children bring a stuff like math problems into the real world when they go to the grocery store or something like that. I seen a lot of parents work with their children. Basically slowing down the adult world and paying attention to all those decisions made throughout the day. They become automatic for adults but you slow down and talk it through with your child and explain your going to the grocery store now, I've hundred dollars to spend can help me keep track of our budget. Teach them to estimate or use the Later. We are walking through the Christie Sir, paying attention to the labels right now. I want to teach you to read. We went to look for low sodium levels. Can help you find products with low sodium levels. Is a variety of things you can do in the grossest or that involve the children in your decision-making and open up that door to your thinking that allows them to stay until actually stimulated vacation the process and is a lot through that in a real world way to Their summer reading programs the library's hat. Are they still popular? Yes. The show the librarians what books they been breeding asking for books in their interest areas. It was great to see librarians encourage in the areas the children were excited about reading. We went to see kids excited about reading because that's what get them practicing and having them continue reading desperate using the skills we want them to stay fresh with. An added dimension of the summer reading programs is technology. Absolutely. Students are grading new things during the summer using tech apps. Some of our favorites we see are younger students using a scratch Junior. It's available for pre-K to third grade and they can create programming and coding. They can code a pretty level using scratch Junior. Is pretty amazing. It is fun. It spans the grades so they have regular scratch that goes up to grades three through nine as well. Is also a lot of stem activities they can do. There's a website called instructor pulls.com. Students can look up how to make anything on there from beauty products to camera stabilizer to an alarm clock. They can learn how to make that on line. It's really a fun tool kit to use. One of the oddest Summerside losses I was reading about is a loss of social skills. Why would that happen? Many children stay at home alone or just with their siblings and don't interact much. It's really great to get kids out playing outdoors with the neighborhood kids or as many children as they can to keep the social skills going. Gone were the days you could tell all your kids and money were were by the bikes parked in front of the house. Doused the neighborhood I grew up in. What happens is that students are very social during the school year. During the summer, that tends to dissipate. They end up online and video games. A lot of parents don't know what to do in cases like that. That's her some of the social networking applications can come in the Obviously they need to be monitored. Students tend to stay connected in that that weight nowadays. We talked about summer cabins and how some of them were quite expensive. Are some better than others? What should parents look for with the eye towards keeping a children's skills and brain active? There are a lot of camps that have names and they will promote a particular theme in a content area that excite the children. Science camp, math camp, etc. Those are good to put kids in Chile have a special interests. The other thing to look for is make sure there are enough children in the age group because sometimes they are very multi agent level and kids don't always find children to interact with. You want to make sure this exercise involved. Laticia there is a healthy snack provided throughout the day. There's been a lot of criticism over the years that kids are too busy. Their racing from one activity to another. Some may say summer is a time where kids can just decompress and turn it all off. Get some genuine do-nothing leisure time to Is actually good for kids? I think it's great for kids. They need to be able to sit down and just relax. A lot of times they don't get to do that during the academic year. If you look at their school day, they get up in the morning and get ready to school. I school and then homework. But the time homework is done in the shower any dinner and they are done. I think having it that summertime to just relax and sit down and really contemplate what they are going to do next is a good thing. I would say you can't forget that learning can be a fun thing it doesn't have to be formal like in school settings. It can be done in formal way -- informal way and relaxing. Parents of don't have to worry so much about being formal getting the workbooks out. It doesn't have to be like that. It's better that it's not because people need time to relax. It gives them a chance if you can think of other methods going outdoors with them, let them plan trips around the city, those are all fun relaxing event's. They also keep the brain stimulated when you just come back and say the kids aren't used to being in school. They are too relaxed. That hasn't happened with us for a while. [ Laughter ] You're also mentioning something about taking trips and creating Google maps of these trips to That's one of my favorite things to do. A lot of people don't know that Google maps use it just to find out where they are going and how long it's going to take. What you can do is drop a pan and add information about that location. You can add a video you rated about that location. You can add images and text. One of the things I enjoy to see after children have gone on vacation is for them to have created a Google map of where David gone. To have the locations about where they have gone and personal mementos and information they gathered. Maybe a video or a story, maybe a picture. Think that's one of the really great ways to stimulate your child this summer where they are going. To also plan a trip. I think it's a to do this on the content and say we're going to you yesterday. These are the sites I want to see in Yosemite and this is what I want to do. With some really interesting tips on our website that these ladies had given us and we've researched our own. It might help the summer slide in your family. Thank you for coming on and speaking with us for the . Be sure to watch KPBS evening edition on KPBS television. Join us tomorrow for discussions on midday edition on KPBS FM. I Maureen Cavanaugh thank you for listening.