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Bill Cirone: How to Help Your Child Enjoy Summer
There are many ways to help your child have a good summer. First of all, get organized. Have children start a collection — rocks, stamps, baseball cards, bottle caps, labels, marbles, leaves or bugs. They can arrange them in some orderly fashion by categories, by color or alphabetically, for example.
Ask youngsters to organize photos in an album by date or activity. Save newspaper or magazine photos of favorite athletes or heroes to create a scrapbook.
Suggest that kids swap paperbacks, comics or magazines with extended family and friends.
It’s also a good time to help your child develop a sense of responsibility. Ask children to take charge of family recycling. Teach boys and girls how to take care of their clothes, sort and fold laundry, use the washer and dryer or help at the laundromat, sew on buttons, iron or polish shoes.
Summer is also a good time to bolster the three Rs. Recommend that children keep a diary or a journal of their activities or the family’s outings. Take time every day for the whole family to read by themselves or together. Even 10 or 15 minutes is fine. Allow children to choose reading materials. Introduce children to library’s summer reading program.
You can also have children follow a favorite newspaper comic strip all summer. Have them write letters or send postcards to cousins, grandparents, and friends, or review cash register receipts. Children can check them for accuracy when you’re unloading groceries. Adding the prices up each week will keep math skills sharp.
You can also teach youngsters to compute gas mileage. If you hold a yard sale or garage sale, allow children to set prices and make change, to further sharpen skills.
These are just a few suggestions that can help make for a good summer, while reinforcing learning.
— Bill Cirone is Santa Barbara County’s superintendent of schools.
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» on 06.18.09 @ 05:42 AM
Bill Cirone is a great guy, and a pillar of the community.
However, in these time of budget crisis, is anyone examining what, exactly, the County Superintendent of Schools office does for our children, what their budget is, and why their budget couldn’t be drastically reduced or even eliminated?
For example, Mr. Cirone’s last column lamented the firing of Diane Siegal, teacher of the year. Why couldn’t the school districts eliminate an admin position at the County Superintendent’s office instead?
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» on 06.18.09 @ 09:43 AM
Well these are very nice suggestions, sort of on par with what anyone might find in any parenting magazine. What exactly is Cirone’s job, I wonder, and how does he get to write this fluff when there are so many serious issues in education that require high-level thinking. My child would have a much better summer, and so would his parents, if we had some idea of what his school will look like in the fall—and which talented teachers will be forced out the doors.
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» on 06.19.09 @ 07:16 AM
Nice article, Bill.
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