Here are a few suggestions that I found on Dangerously Irrelevant, a great blog by Dr. Scott McLeod. The following are ideas that were contributed by a variety of teachers.
Summer "Learning" Projects
- Try geocaching.
- Make a commercial for your city. Use a camcorder and post it on YouTube.
- Use Stellarium to find the view from your home. Then go outside at night to locate the sky features shown by the software.
- Do a service project using TakingITGlobal.
- Map out your summer travels on Google Earth.
- Research a topic that you may want to learn more about and create an article on Wikipedia.
- Create an oral history project. Visit your grandparents, the local VFW or nursing home. Armed with questions and a digital voice recorder, document your subject's past. Post the oral histories as a series of podcasts.
- Create a visual tour of your city using Flickr. Using a digital camera take pictures of all the sites in your city. Once uploaded, write descriptions about each location and then create a set for all the pictures in Flickr. The set could be used as a guide to the sites the student deemed interesting.
The point of these projects is to instill in our students that learning does not only have to take place in a classroom but rather, learning is an organic process that involves inquiry and thought and can happen anywhere at any time. Whether it involves technology or not, the point of projects like these is to engage our students and make them understand that learning shouldn't stop when their last exam is done in June.
photo credit: greg.turner
Thanks for the link! Research shows that - on average - children in higher-SES families continue their learning during the summer through vacations, camp, trips to museums, etc. while lower-SES children's learning stops completely and doesn't resume again until the next school year. Over time, this is a huge contributor to the learning gaps we see between high- and low-SES children.
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