After an unconventional year, families and caregivers might be thinking about how to support their children’s ongoing learning while also enjoying summertime. Personalized learning is a great approach. Simply put, personalized learning customizes instruction to an individual, allowing them to grow at their own pace.
We’ve partnered with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science to share research-based tips on how you can engage in joyful learning with the kids in your life. These recommendations and activities are specifically for kids between ages 8 and 12:
- Discover a passion project. Research shows that focusing on an area of interest increases a student’s motivation to work on it.
Most kids love dinosaurs, space, animals, or rocks—and maybe all four! The Denver Museum of Nature & Science has all of these, plus a lot more, making it easy to connect your child’s passion to a personalized learning experience. Children can explore at the Museum or connect to DMNS OnDemand (https://www.dmns.org/dmns-on-demand/) for videos, activities, experiments, and crafts that they can do at home.
- Have a learning goal in mind, either something your child is struggling with or excels in. Use what you have heard from conversations with teachers and report card comments to work with your child to identify a goal together.
Research indicates learning is greater when children have a purpose for what they do. Ask your child these two simple questions: “What are you trying to learn?” and “How will you know if you have learned it?” For example, a child may say they want to learn about dinosaurs. Match this statement to a “How will you know?” outcome, such as “I will be able to compare two dinosaurs and talk about how they are alike or different,” or “I will draw a picture of two different dinosaurs and label them.” Identifying a specific action to take at the end of the learning exercise is motivating for the child—and fun!
- Incorporate asking questions, making predictions, collaborating, counting, and open-ended exploring that lets the child drive the learning. Summertime offers plenty of opportunity for a single activity to support the development of these multiple skills—and more—in the child.
- To build vocabulary and reading skills, have your child keep a journal. Encourage their use of rich, descriptive language or ask them to recount the order of activities during a day of play correctly, a skill known as sequencing.
- Drawing pictures while making observations of something real builds stamina for focusing, develops eye-hand coordination and fine motor skills, and lets children practice making a plan and then following it. You can also try some of these art-based activities at home:
- Create a dinosaur from modeling clay or dough: Sculpt-a-saurus
- Color Mixing Exploration using ice cube trays, water, and food coloring
- Creating charts or graphs supports learning numbers and basic math. Have your child keep a log of the different animals or plants they see through the summer and then graph those numbers. Catch ladybugs in the yard and count the spots on their wings. Keep a record over the summer—do most of the ladybugs have the same number of spots or not? These instructions for extracting DNA from fruit in your own kitchen will let kids practice math and measurement!
- Explore cause and effect with balls and homemade ramps. Use cardboard or pieces of wood to make ramps of different lengths. Use blocks to lift the ramps higher. Explore how far balls roll when ramps are shorter and higher, or longer and lower. How many different ramps can your child think up? Check out our instructions for facilitating this activity at home:
- Turn open-ended activities like catch or jumping rope into experiments by asking “what-if” questions: “What happens if I throw the ball underhand?” or “What happens if I throw the ball straight up in the air?” Asking questions and trying things out builds skills for learning science (making predictions, testing ideas, counting, and comparing). They also build the skills children will need in the workplace of the future: critical thinking, reasoning, and analysis. Try these activities about waves using a jump rope:
- If you can visit the Museum this summer, bring paper and colored pencils so your child can write about or draw all the things they see and do! Add in elements from the bullets above (asking questions, being open-ended, counting and/or categorizing) during your visit so your child can practice these broader skills. Plan a Museum visit by logging on to https://www.dmns.org/visit/ for information on location, hours, and current exhibits. While there, try this family-friendly Numbers in Nature Scavenger Hunt or the in-exhibit Stonehenge Challenge.
- Approach learning in a purposeful and authentic way. Move away from workbooks and toward a project that can be used or shared with others in a meaningful way.
Having an end goal, such as sharing your project with family or neighbors, will make it feel less like “busywork.”There are numerous scientific investigations happening all the time that need help from the community! Several websites offer families information on current research and links to sign up to participate. This is a great way for a child to explore a passion while contributing to real science. To find a project, visit https://scistarter.org/ and go to “Project Finder” to search among 1,500 current research projects needing community-based scientists. Another website offering similar information is www.citsci.org.
As you support children by following their passions and employing these personalized learning tips this summer, see how much fun you have while building the confidence of the young learners in your life!
