Both articles that I received this week from Google Alerts related to the inevitable “summer slide” that a lot of students experience. During the summer, students can often lose gains that they made over the school year. This loss can be especially devastating to ELLs. If an ELL doesn’t have any way to practice English at home over the summer, they could possibly regress in their English language proficiency level.

At a community center in Utah, several teachers host a summer camp that is open to all students, but is mainly populated with native Spanish speaking students. The program coordinator, Alyssa Escalante states, “Summer learning loss is real and is especially prevalent in low-income families.” This program provides educational support for students as well as feeding them breakfast, lunch, and snacks that they can take home.

In Georgia, an elementary school is running a summer camp just for ESL students. This summer camp uses a lot of technology to make the camp more interesting for the students. In one activity that the article explains, students use an App to scan a picture. The picture then “comes to life” and says a sentence in English that is using a sight word. The students then practiced that sight word by writing their own sentence using it. Students also learned basic coding to create a robot that will act out activities in a story that they wrote in English. The students in this camp were also given backpacks with activities that they can use at home to practice English when the camp ends.

Students in both of these summer camps not only are practicing their academic English through structured activities and technology, but they are also able to practice their social English. The low-pressure environment of a summer camp is a great setting for students to be able to take risks in the language. I hope that this review of these two articles might inspire some teachers to try to start their own ESL summer camp that can help prevent “summer slide”.

Resources:

Dodson, B. (2017, July). Program helping Boulder’s kids avoid brain drain. Retrieved from:

http://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/central/provo/program-helping-boulders-kids-avoid-

summer-brain-drain/article_69950417-1588-55b6-bbf8-dd61d916f4e9.html

Morgan, S. (2017, July). Knollwood elementary school hosts ESL summer camp. Retrieved from:

http://www.salisburypost.com/2017/07/04/knollwood-hosts-esl-summer-camp/