Preventing the Spring Break Brain Drain
Use Kiddom to support distance learning, wherever you and your students may roam
Going on spring (or even summer) break doesn’t mean that students have to turn off their brains. One analysis in the Review of Educational Research found that students can lose as much as a month of learning during school breaks, and teachers know how difficult it can be to rebuild academic routines after time off.
Creating flexible, creative assignments for students to work on over a school vacation can help them imagine new worlds, stay connected to their classrooms, and stay mentally active. Here are some ways you can use Kiddom to facilitate these types of assignments, so your students can keep learning and you can take some well-deserved rest.
Send your Students on a Virtual Vacation
Google Arts and Culture allows the public to access high-resolution images of artworks, take a virtual walk through real museums around the world, or look at thematic collections of exhibits — all for free!
Choose a specific museum, work of art, or theme and send to you your students with open-ended questions for them to explore and reflect. Or, send them the link to the overall site and let them choose their own adventure! Find even more tips for incorporating art in our teacher-developed arts guide focused on standards-based, interdisciplinary instruction.
Suggested Resources:
- Harry Potter: A History of Magic from the British Library exhibition
- Virtual Tours: The Natural History Museum in London
- Latino Murals in the United States
Pause to Journal and Reflect
Break is a good time for students to dig into social emotional skills while they take a step back from a purely academic focus. Kiddom’s Google Drive integration allows you to send journaling prompts to your class, and Kiddom automatically makes a copy for each student to write their individual reflections. You can also have students reflect on their own progress towards mastery using the reports that they find in their Kiddom dashboards. You can even align these assignments to CASEL’s standards to track progress towards healthy social emotional development.
Send Content for Remediation or Exploration
Ahead of break, take a look at your mastery reports in Kiddom and pick one or two standards for students to work on. You can search for these topics or standards to find extension or remediation resources and assign directly to the students who need them.
Kiddom’s library has a wide range of multimedia resources to keep your students’ minds moving while they’re away from school. Articles about students from around the world or podcasts about current events can drive critical thinking skills.
Sample thematic content from Kiddom’s Library of free resources (click to assign directly to your class in Kiddom):
- From Newsela: On spring break, students learn how to preserve Civil War graveyard
- From Newsela: Time often flies when we’re on the road and scientists think they know why
- From TEDEd: Why is that some experiences feel like they last forever, while others fly by?
- From PBS Learning: Interactive: 100 Years of Passenger Air Travel
Each of these suggestions can be reworked to fit your class needs with Kiddom’s flexible assignment structure and student-centered communication tools. Comment on assignments as your students work, and keep consistency going so the re-adjustment is a little smoother on the Monday after break.
P.S. Got other ideas for how to use Kiddom over break? Tweet them at @kiddomapp and share your strategies! We’ll include them in our newsletter to teachers.
