Summertime tends to be a great time for dyslexic students.
The grinding schoolwork routine is gone – and school, if at all, has fewer time commitments and less time in a seat.
TAKE A BREAK
First, especially if your student has had a difficult school year with heavy workloads, make sure there’s sufficient time to rest, recover, and do different things. Many students need a chance to remember that life is not school and they are not their report cards.
EXPLORE AND CONNECT
Summer can be a great time to explore the world, pursue new interests, and spend time on hobbies. So many people have told us over the years that what matters the most to them in their career success had little to do with schoolwork.
The dots don’t have to be in a line, either. Summer jobs may give students experience at responsibility and leadership and a boost up in addition to money in the bank. Experiences don’t necessarily have to be formal classes, although having a class with a professional in a field a student may be interested in can be exciting and even life-changing.
For some students, their gift may be in people skills. As a result, their free time might be spent with friends – but that doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t developing their super strength that will carry them into their adult years.
If you have a friend or acquaintance with an interesting career, ask if they could job shadow or meet your kids to tell them about their career. Many people are happy to do this, and it can get the wheels turning about what they might really want to do when they get older.
When our kids were younger, I learned a dad in our daughter’s class worked at a video game company. I asked if our kids and their friends could visit him at work – he said yes – and they were thrilled! They learned that he had worked as an architect before, but got hired by the company (Valve) to create environments. He told them that when he was an architect, he had to work a long time on a single building, but creating worlds for the game company, it was more creative because he could make a lot more and had more latitude in their design in these imaginary worlds.
Seeing the digital artwork inspired our son, and touring a game studio inspired our daughter, who then was just learning how to design simple Flash games.
WHAT ABOUT REVIEW?
Summer learning loss is a real occurrence – so if there is a way to incorporate some reading, writing, and math into the long days of summer, it could help keep skills up (and even get a little ahead) by the time the school year rolls around again.
It’s most common for students to lose ground in math and spelling rather than reading.
MATH
For math, this is the time to set a regular math card game time.
We are Teachers has a great list of math card games. Remember the skill of breaking down and putting together numbers (like finding 10’s) can improve flexibility with numbers that’s not dependent on rote memory.
Making minor changes to favorite games can increase the math challenge to wherever they are. For example, playing “Go Fish” to make 10’s or doing multiplication War (play 2 cards at a time and use the multiplication product of the two numbers to see who wins a round).
For spelling, what you choose may depend on your student. Many spelling apps can help your student get some practice in and keep up some skills over the summer. Summer schools or tutoring may offer creative writing groups – and spelling can be snuck into the process – even if students use spellcheck or something like Grammarly.
Finally, getting students hooked on books is much easier during the summer than during the school year.
Let your student read whatever they’d like whether it’s a popular book based on a movie or game, magazine, comic book, or game manual.
If reading is still difficult, offer to read the first chapter or few to get over the hump of being introduced to the characters and general scene. Character names and places are often difficult to decode – so hearing the first chapters can make the rest of the book easier to read.
Try pairing a print book with audio – this may be easier for some students than reading along in an e book app. Some might also do well with an e-book app, especially if time is taken to customize the rate and the display options to match a student’s speed of reading. Check out the next articles for apps that offer free online reading from your public library.
