Ah yes - summer time. That period when our students get to rest, relax, and forget all those skills we worked so hard to build over the school year. 😎😂
Researchers are divided on the specifics of the "summer slide" -- factors like age, income level, subject matter, and parent involvement all contribute to varied learning loss over the summer. Some younger students actually do better after a long break! 😲
But it's safe to assume that many of your students will need some "tuning up" once school starts again. Here are some strategies for reigniting those good student skills:
🏄 Start with broad science skills: I know you have a curriculum you need to get through, but maybe hold off on that for a minute. The back-to-school transition might be smoother if you start with more general science content.
Where to start? How about measuring the physical properties of matter? It's great prep for labs, and you can work in a review of the metric system, too. The hands-on aspect will remind them how much fun science can be, too.
Another idea is to have different teams measure out fun science facts. The amount of blood in the human body? Have that team measure out 5 liters of water. How much sugar is in a soft drink? Let that team figure it out from the bottle and measure it out with actual sugar. This is a great chance to talk about modeling too!
🏄 Get hands-on with some math practice: Researchers found that computation is one area where student drop off happens after summer break. When you're starting with measuring, you can have students explore how measurements of different units compare. How many footsteps are in a meter? If a student walked a 5K race, how many steps would they take?
If you're using the team fact-modeling, you can also practice conversions and comparisons between the teams. This builds number sense that your math teaching colleagues will appreciate!
🏄 Working in some informational reading practice: Reading in science is a little different; it's nonfiction, informational reading where our purpose is to collect information about a topic. It can be hard to jump back in after a summer off!
My suggestion: articles about fun, interesting "science in the news" topics. Should we spend more resources trying to get to Mars? Is it ethical to bring back extinct organisms? Having students annotate their articles to get ready for a "debate style" discussion can get them really digging in.
🏄 Getting your students writing: Formal writing, like CERs and lab reports, might be easier if you do something a little less structured first.
Science journals are a fun place for students to record observations, predictions, creative analogies, and other connections to a science experience.
You can work these into the hands-on science ideas from earlier, too - have students write reactions to the fun facts they discovered, or challenge them to write a narrative that uses all the materials they measured as part of the story.
I hope some of these suggestions make the switch from lazy summer days to focused school work a little less daunting for you and your students!
If you enjoyed the awesome teaching strategies shared here, join the Kesler Science mailing list below! We also send out fun phenomenon, graphs, sale notices, and product highlights throughout the year. You can unsubscribe at any time, and we never sell your info. We hate spam, too!