Summer Homeschooling for Your Incoming 1st Grader
Summer is just around the corner and if you’re anything like my Aunt was when I was growing up, you’re looking to utilize summer as an extra learning opportunity for your child. Whether it’s enrolling them into a summer school program or you’re taking the task on yourself, here are a few tips to get you started.
1: Create a Getepic.com account. Get Epic is a great website to sign your child up for. It has thousands of books for them (or you!) to choose from to help them read over the summer. You can track what books they’re reading, how much they are reading and set goals for them. If you want to work on their reading comprehension, Get Epic allows, when choosing a book, to require a quiz at the end. It allows certain books to read the book to your child and it provides definitions to keywords in the books!
2: Sign up for Splashlearn.com. Splash Learn is a free website for you, the parent, to sign your child up for. It has math games for them to play while practicing their math skills! Who doesn’t love games? It makes learning fun! Splash Learn has games for everything your child will be learning in math in 1st grade.
3: If you and your child are anything like my class, you love a fun, do-anywhere, math game. One we enjoy in my classroom is POP!. POP! is a game to help practice your child’s counting skills. Standing in a long line at the grocery store? Or taking a road trip? This game is easy to play to test your child’s counting skills. You can count by tens and yell POP! at every even 10 you get. Or you could count by ones and yell POP! at all the odd numbers. If you are working on adding or subtracting, you could give your child many different addition or subtraction problems and they yell POP! if their number is 5,10,15, 20 and so on. This game is so versatile and easy, it can be played anywhere and in any way!
4: Last but not least, another River Crew favorite, BINGO! We love Bingo in the River Crew and we play it in many different ways. Now, this game will take a bit of preparation, but once complete, they can be used over and over again. First, create and print out many different variations of addition and subtraction bingo game boards. You can put equations without the answers, or the answers to equations on your bingo cards. This will force your child to really think about what the answer may be. After you’ve created and printed out your bingo boards, laminate them. This helps them last and become dry erase! Lastly, don’t forget to make your calling cards, or calling balls by writing an equation or number on a small piece of paper, ball them up and them out of a bowl or hat!