Outdoor Learning and Literacy in the Summer Months
Summer is a time for reflection, relaxation, outdoor exploration and family adventures and an opportunity to support children’s literacy skills through every day summer activities. By encouraging children to use their literacy and numeracy knowledge in different environments, students are able to consolidate their learning.
Over the summer months, students can sometimes regress in terms of literacy and numeracy skills which were taught in the previous school year. Scholar’s Choice is calling this the ‘summer slide’. Encouraging your child to be curious and learn while playing could help them maintain their skills and knowledge. Helping Prevent Children From Experiencing “Summer Slide” (scholarschoice.ca).
Research shows that outdoor education encourages children to be more physically active, improves their attention and motivation, and reduces stress levels. Outdoor education allows for inclusiveness and inquiry-based learning. Children who engage in a minimum of one hour of active play each day have better academic scores, a stronger heart, stronger bones and muscles, improved self-esteem, and experience lower levels of stress (Public Health Agency of Canada, 2019).
Here is a list of outdoor literacy activities to do with children this summer
Alphabet Walk
When out walking or driving together, look for letters in the environment. Children can draw or take pictures of what they see. When returning home, facilitate creating possible words (name) or create an Alphabet Walk journal. This can be done inside the house or mall on rainy days.
Wash the Words
Write words on the road with chalk. Provide your child with a scrub brush and water. Say the word and have your child find it. Once they find the word, have them tell you each sound in the word as they scrub it off the road. You can also play a similar game with deleting parts of the word. Write a word like Cat. Have the child find the word. Tell them to scrub off the /c/. What is the new word?
Segmenting the Outdoors
Have your child collect some earthly items in a bag. Pull one item out of the bag and ask your child to say what it is (i.e. rock). Now say, “tell me each individual sound you hear in the word, rock”. Response: /r/, /o/, /ck/. The rock would have 3 sounds. Have your child segment each sound on their fingers if needed, decide together how many sounds are in the word. Review the sounds of all the treasures in the bag.
Blending Activities
Using the outdoors and the five senses, explore all that can be seen, heard, smelled, touched and tasted. A listening walk can be used to draw attention to hearing nature. For instance, parents can say, “I hear with my little ear the sound of the /w/, /i/, /n/, /d/, what did you hear?”. Then, the child is encouraged to put the sounds together and blend the sounds into the word ‘wind’. A version of this could be playing the game “eye spy” while relaxing under the shade of a tree. The parent can say “I spy with my little eye a /b/, /ir/, /d/”. Then, the child is encouraged to put the sounds together and blend the sounds into the word ‘bird’.
For more information on outdoor learning and literacy in the summer months, check out the sites below.