The Great Summer Packet Debate
I always debate on whether or not to give my students summer packets. Although I'm a big believer in a good school/home connection I have often spent many hours putting packets together, only to discover that no one has opened them during the summer.
This year, I tried something different. I sent out a survey to the parents of my students asking if they wanted a summer packet, wanted suggestions of websites or free apps to use with their children over the summer. Honestly I didn't expect to get many surveys back, but much to my surprise, about half my caseload responded that they did want the summer packet or information about websites and apps. I turned to the Internet to see what I could discover. (There's no use reinventing the wheel!)
I'm sure most of us know about the free summer calendar at Speaking of Speech.
Check out these cute calendars at Perkilou Products. Here's a calendar and another. This SLP makes cute gift bags for her students and I love summer activities found here.
A few years ago, a preschool teacher and I wrote weekly letters we copied before school got out full of activities and tips for language development. We mailed them once a week or so during the summer, and our littlest students loved getting letters from their teachers.
This year, I'm going to give some older language disordered students journals. I'm going to have them pick one or two activities a week to journal, and hopefully check correct sentence structure and verb forms with their parents.
I'm still working on which websites and free IPad apps I can recommend to parents, so stay tuned! If I find some I'll share them with you, and please feel free to share your ideas below in the comment section or on the ADVANCE Facebook page.