Summer Learning

I am available via email during the summer at purcellshareen@gmail.com I may not check it every day, but I will check it regularly.

It seems more and more parents are enrolling their kids in summer learning programs, which is great, and not. Some are a lot of money, but not much learning. Whatever you choose to do, I have given your child the tools to learn, and you can help keep them on track with it over the summer. If you look through the pages here, there are lots of ideas we spent all year doing to build on, and lots of things you, as a parent, can do, particularly on Useful Information to Help with Daily Work and Your Child's Brain. Please read this section. Parents can do what I do with their own children. It is explained in depth.

Besides what we think of as the content that they need to learn, more importantly, they need to learn life skills so they can learn. One of the most important of those skills is the ability to focus and keep at something. Grit (see Useful Information for Parents) is this ability kept up for long periods of time and is the ONLY factor we see in all successful people. So it is very important to learn to focus,and understand that it is a learned skill. With all of the constant stimulation, and particularly electronic media to distract, it is rewiring their brains to not be able to concentrate, literally. It is really important to teach the brain to do so while it is still has the ability to do so somewhat easily. It gets much more difficult to do the older we get. Detoxing from the constant need to look at the phone, computer, and tv is really important. One way to do this is to read a book. Observe your child and notice their ability to stay focused on reading. If they cannot, they need detox.

If they just read daily, any book THEY choose, that will improve their skills and stamina a lot. Parents can easily have a quick conversation daily about the reading, and students can practice writing the two sentence chapter summary just like we did all year. It's actually a difficult task to focus the main idea of a whole chapter into a few sentences, so this is great practice taking the knowledge from their head and putting it on paper, completing that circle of understanding from mind, mouth, and hand.

Below I also attached the Essay Basics we did at the beginning of the year, which is a step by step process in for learning the terminology, what it really means, and being able to identify it in a sample essay. Also, I attached Understanding Theses so you can see examples using history of the difference between a word, a concept, and a focused thesis.

If you read the Useful Information for Parents page, you can see a lot of the thinking in why I am doing things as well as strategies. One way you can help your child learn to read and write is to have them read that and summarize it, respond to it, write a counter argument to it, or whatever. Writing is not about having the correct opinion, but being able to defend their opinion with facts/evidence and explaining how (commentary, justification, etc.)

Please read Your Child's Brain. This is the logic in why they need the constant practice of reading, writing, and oral response. You can do this with anything they need to learn.

On the bottom of the home page is a link to Essentials of Good Learners. (I will make this an actual page when I can figure out how to! And I will finish the summary over the summer.) It is basically a summary of a great book that talks about . . . the essentials of good learners! What can you do with it? You can read it. How can you help your child learn more? Have them read it and summarize each section. Or they can create an organizer (we did many of these!) showing they know the information. Or they can make a song, Or? There are lots of ways to show learning.

For those kids who had me for LA, they wrote their own grammar book all year long and had better still have it! Perhaps they can teach you grammar each day? Do you think you know what a noun is, or a sentence? Well, let them teach you. If you can teach someone, you are showing true mastery of something.