For those of you who have been following us for some time now, and if you’re new you’ll now find out, we are not only educators but parents of two young boys. I don’t know about your students or personal children at home, but as for ours, the ending to this school year left them with a bitter taste in their mouths for this thing we call “learning.” As educators, this is so disheartening and frustrating, but at the same time can we really blame them? I would guess that many other children are feeling the same way as ours—burnt out, tired, apathetic, frustrated, bitter—the list could do on and on. We acknowledge that a few skills may have been lost or at least lessened during remote learning, so this summer we wanted to take an interACTIVE approach to keeping the learning alive.
What Does InterACTIVE Learning Look Like in the Summer?
As far as we are concerned, learning can be found in anything-from playing with friends in the puddles left by the afternoon rain, to hunting for tadpoles in the ditch, or by hiking hidden forest trails. We as parents believe though that there are times that if we don’t consciously make an effort to expose these moments are children will easily get lost in their choices of video games, TV shows and YouTube channels. Not that these things are bad, but we make an effort to keep our children the active participants in our day rather than passive participants.
When balancing our day, we often give the kids choice is our daily schedule and what types of things we are going to do. Regardless of the activity though, we try to keep a few principles in the forefront as we plan.
Inquiry: Many times in school students are just given information to process, memorize or curate with little time given for true investigation and inquiry. We like to find the things that interest our kids, just like we would our students, and then build in small ways they can investigate these things further.
Play: There is so much learning that comes through play. Just pure, unregulated, creative play. So much of our normal day is regulated and we work hard and encourage activities that revolve around play.
Collaboration: Collaborating with others is closely related to play, but really the idea here is finding activities and opportunities where our kids have to work together to be successful. It’s important to keep skills like listening, revising sharp, so when our kids do go back into the classroom they will be able to coexist with their classmates again.
Reflection: Being able to reflect and remember an experience is important to us. Sometimes there is learning to be found even after a fun activity or event though a simple, thoughtful conversation.
How to Create InterACTIVE Learning Activities
Choose your priorities: Do you want to be outside more? Maybe you want to try and reconnect with friend and family after this period of solitary. Perhaps you want to keep your kids actively reading or writing or working on other specific skills. Decide on what your priorities are and then create experiences that your children will inevitably get to do those things through.
Set aside time to be present: We can relate to this more than ever now that we have been working from home, but we try to be purposefully present with our kids during these learning moments and activities. It is true what they say about the quality of the time spent over the quantity of time given. We often find that at first our children may resist or be uninterested in a specific task or activity, but once they see us involved they quickly become committed to the task. This is the foundation of interACTIVE relationships—they are two way and reciprocal.
Tip: If you find it hard to separate your work time or are having trouble getting in a productive time for you, try building a time in to work when your kids are doing something less involved. For example, when our children get their time for video games or screens, we used this as a time to sit and read emails, work on presentations or take some quality time to read a book!
Keep it fresh: Our kids love going to the beach, but if we went every other day they would quickly lose the excitement of going and be less engaged with the adventures we had there. So we go often, sometimes changing the spot we visit, the time of day we go out, or who we go with. We try to rotate our favorite activities like swimming or bike riding and sprinkle in the newer and more unknown adventures in between.
InterACTIVE Summer Learning Ideas
Being teachers may help us a bit as we plan for our summer, but we also love learning from the unplanned, organic moments we spend with our kids. We did include though a few of the things we have done so far with our own kids that have been engaging and definitely educational. We also included some ideas that we hope to get to this summer as well.
Another thing we have started this summer with our own kids are summer “adventure” journals. The original idea came from a local blogger named Kelli Hampton and essentially we keep track of all the small things we do and journal our memories. You could, as Kelli suggests, make the journal ahead of time as almost a bucket list of sorts, with challenges and things for you kids to do, but we keep ours more organic. Our pages stay blank and we just record whatever memories we wish to. Before summer started we purchased a pack of small, blank passports and are using one of Mrs. Merrill’s favorite classroom tools—her sprocket printer. A sprocket is a small, wireless, photo printer that allows you to print small, Polaroid-like photos straight from your phone. (And as of the day I wrote this blog, the printer linked here was $40 off which is the cheapest I’ve seen it!)
In today’s time we take the majority of photos on our phones and this printer allows the kids to print the photos we took documenting our activity or trip, peel off the sticky backing and plop the photos down in their adventure journals. They then write whatever they like to in regards to what we did, and this allows mom and dad to give a bit of writing review as we go. You could totally make these journals digitally too! We would recommend programs like Book Creator or Buncee for something like this.
What’s great is that the kids usually take the lead and will often ask us to take a photo so they will have it to write about in their adventure journals. They are taking the ownership of it which is always what you want when it comes to learning. The packet of books came with multiples, so if they fill up one book they can start another. Maybe even using one as a place for some narrative writing too! (A mom can hope, right?)
The beauty of interACTIVE learning is that it can happen anywhere! It doesn’t always have to use technology or be in a classroom full of students. Here’s to having a summer filled with memories and learning!
Stay interACTIVE!
~👗➕👓
For more information on how you can make learning in the classroom more #interACTIVE, check out our book The InterACTIVE Class!
