The Parent Guide to Summer was written because parents asked for it.
At the original parent idea sharing meetings, parents talked about how nice it would be to have their own summer learning guide. Researchers tell us parents have the most anxiety in the summer about keeping kids involved in productive activities. ThinkStretch created the Parent Guide to Summer to share with parents what teachers wish they had time to tell parents and to offer parents tried and true summer activities from other parents.
The Parent Guide is in ‘Parent Language’.
It can be a frustrating experience to have a conversation with your child’s teacher and feel like your are not understanding what the teacher is trying to tell you. We all have our “work” language. And teachers are very comfortable using the vocabulary of their profession. However, as parents we are not as familiar with “Dibble ratings” or “phonetic structures” or even “reciprocal equations.” The Parent Guide to Summer is written for parents, by a parent. When I was creating the home activities by reading level, for example, teachers were telling me about the different scales to separate young readers into ability groups. But I reflected on my parenting experience to think about the reading milestones I saw with my child – the move from board books to picture books, from picture books to short chapter books, the first books with no pictures at all, and the intense non-fiction book. I used that experience to translate all of the key information teachers wanted to share into language and experiences that parents could readily understand.
We created a separate summer learning guide for parents!
We did not put all of that information for parents into the student workbook – because after a long hot summer, who wants to unstick the bubble gum to check the answer key!
