Keep the Words during Summer Vacation

How could your children miss summer fun while reading Click, Clack Moo: Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin, If You Take a Mouse to the Movies by Laura Joffe Numeroff, Olivia Saves the Circus by Ian Falconer, Grandfather’s Journey by Allen Say and Tuesday by David Wiesner?

A major grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Programs funds the program and its advisors are among the top reading experts in the country. Other components of the national multimedia project will include a documentary narrated by Morgan Freeman and a five-part television series called “Raising a Reader.”

Elementary school students can practice their writing skills while still having fun. Sylvan Learning Center is contributing to the cause by offering a free online writing journal with decorative pages and suggested summertime writing topics. Each week the Center will post a new journal page featuring a suggested writing topic on their web site at http://www.educate.com/activities. Parents and children can go to the site, print out the new page and start writing. At the end of the summer children will have 13 unique stories about their summer, which can be bound by one of three journal covers, posted online for children to personalize and decorate. Sample journal topics for students include writing about their best friends on June 8, Best Friend Day, what they would do if they could go into outer space and where they would travel in a hot air balloon and what they would do.

"Summer break is a great time for children to relax and have fun. However, it is also a very important time for children to continue to practice key skills such as writing so they can make a strong start when school returns," says Richard Bavaria, Ph.D., vice president of education for Sylvan Learning Center. "Sylvan Learning Center's summer journal helps children practice their writing over the summer to retain what they learned during the school year, while having fun by writing about their favorite summer memories -- a key aspect of summer learning."

If your children don’t even need this structure, you can buy them a simple notebook, give them their book of the day, point them to their favorite shade tree with a glass of lemonade and let them unleash their imaginations. They can drink the lemonade, drink in a fictional world through the words of the book’s author and also just

Go To Page: 1 2 3