Education ∪ Math ∪ Technology

Year round schools

Kid swinging into a river
(Image credit: Question_Everything)

 

After reading this Global and Mail article shared by Chris Wejr, I realized I had a serious objection to the phrase "learning loss that happens over the summer months" as suggested in the article.

The problem is that kids learn lots of things during the summer, they just aren’t generally learning academic skills during those summer months, except for those unfortunate souls enrolled in summer school.

I remember learning how to swim, how to ride a bicycle, how to complete the computer game Might and Magic II, how to organize times to meet up with my friends and many other fun things. I was a reader, so I also spent much of my summer reading. However, I challenge the notion that kids are learning nothing during the summer; they just aren’t learning the skills schools consider valuable.

If we find that there are kids who are not able to engage in these kinds of unstructured learning activities, we should make these types of summer-time activities more accessible, not take away the summer.