Dralle Summer School Opens This Week

Let me start off by saying I am a huge fan of summer break. I love spending time with the kids at the pool, taking mini vacations around the area and hosting our fair share of friend sleepovers. I especially enjoy the total lack of scheduling, having the freedom to be spontaneous, to stay up way too late and sleep in even later.

However, seventy-plus free days without any academic input I am firmly convinced leads to brain drain. From basic math skills to spelling and punctuation, sharp minds turn to oatmeal if the brain remains unchallenged.

Hence, Jim and I founded the Dralle Summer School program a few summers ago in an effort to seal the Swiss cheese knowledge holes generated by sunscreen fumes, chlorine and barbeque smoke.

As Jordan and Jamie love to read as much as I do, weekly trips to the library over the summer are never met with protest. Sometimes we participate in the library’s formal reading program, other times we simply utilize the reading list to find new authors and books to spark our interest.

Daily journaling tends to be free form in nature. Sometimes I offer a topic suggestion or two, other times they choose to write about their summer adventures in progress. Spelling and punctuation are checked to keep skills sharp, and every so often Jordan or Jamie will opt to throw in an illustration or two for fun. I’ll return the favor with a word search or crossword puzzle.

And then there’s math: Rather than cover any new territory, we spend the summer reviewing all lessons from the previous year, focusing most on areas that gave Jordan or Jamie the most challenges, and always taking the time to pull out the flashcards and drill, drill, drill the core basics.

Yes, on the days that we are in town we hold “school” every day: Worksheets I either create or download from the internet are left in a folder for each of them on the kitchen table the night before with their journals, and are expected to be completed before we go anywhere for the day. A half-hour of reading is up to Jordan and Jamie to squeeze into their schedules, whether in the car, at the beach or before bedtime.

Just for the heck of it, we log the books they read so Jordan and Jamie have a record of their summer accomplishments, as well as their ‘grades’ on their worksheets to track their progress.

While this may sound like a lot of work, it takes less than fifteen minutes an evening to pull work packets together for both kids, and another fifteen to review their journals and worksheets. And as the dog days of summer wear on, I like to believe the kids actually appreciate the small amount of structure these activities provide.

It’s difficult to tell from Jordan and Jamie’s first quarter grades the following school year how much of a difference Dralle Summer School makes, but I know it makes me feel better to know that over the long hot summer we try to be as equally educational and entertaining as possible.