carson-dellosa - Stuff Parents Need

This post was sponsored by Carson–Dellosa as part of an Activation for Influence Central. I received complimentary products to facilitate my review. As always, all thoughts and opinions are my own.

Late last week we had the last day of first grade for my oldest child, Darah, and we pretty much immediately left after that event for our big family vacation. So for us, summer has officially begun!

Darah’s report card came home with her with some specific and helpful suggestions from her teacher about topics to give some extra attention to over the summer to help prevent that dreaded summer slide (a term referring to learning loss that can occur over extended breaks from school).

I’m really grateful for her suggestions, and it gave me a good start, but it wasn’t enough for me to feel as though I had a clear action plan. Searching Pinterest gave me TONS of ideas, but as a result, left me feeling completely overwhelmed about which activities to choose while also making sure that my daughter gets to simply be a kid and relax a bit. I have a really hard time finding that middle ground between overly scheduled days and total bedlam. Just me?

Oh, but friends, I have a FANTASTIC resource for you if you are looking for some help with your children as they leave one grade and prepare for the next. Carson-Dellosa (whose workbooks I simply adore) has just released Summer Bridge Activities workbooks and they are just exactly what I’ve been looking for to provide specific activities, a generous quantity of activities, yet not so much work that your child feels as though s/he is in summer school.

Check out what’s inside!

This book is broken into 3 sections (to go with the roughly 3 months of summer break) and each section has 20 lessons, for a total of 60 lessons to work on, little by little, over the entire summer. You can expect daily lessons to take roughly 15 minutes.

I love that each section covers a wide range of topics and skills (in fact, there’s an awesome chart that shows you which skills are being practiced for each lesson).

The learning activity pages seem appropriately challenging for a child who has gone through first grade, so the material shouldn’t be brand new, but it also isn’t basic (in other words, it’s not a review of the stuff your child was learning during the first few weeks of the school year).

I also am really impressed with all of the bonus learning opportunities. The book suggests various outdoor learning experiences, science experiments and social studies exercises. There’s even more great material that can be found online for free! And don’t forget about the suggested reading list, as well. I’ve already started requesting some of these titles from our local library. 🙂

Friends, I’m no stranger to workbooks. I’ve purchased dozens of them for extra enrichment. This summer bridge workbook is, without question, the most thorough and thoughtfully composed workbook I’ve ever seen. I very highly recommend it and I will most definitely be purchasing them in years to come for my girls. And right now you can score 25% off the price of Summer Bridge workbooks by using code SBA25 at checkout.

I feel so much less stressed about figuring out what I need to have Darah work on over the summer thanks to the resources available through Carson-Dellosa.

Have you started thinking about what you can be doing at home to help prevent summer learning loss? Any tips for the rest of us?

Product samples provided for review purposes. All thoughts and opinions are my own, as always.

So my kids have been out of school for 48 hours. We have been preparing for and enjoying company up until 2 hours ago.

And now they are bored. Just like that. They won’t be back in school for 15 more days! Mama needs some new material to keep these kiddos engaged, and you may be in a similar boat.

Time to break out some workbooks! We’ve been enjoying a collection of workbooks from Spectrum. They have a really nice variety for all ages (toddler through high school), though we have been focused on some kindergarten level work.

spectrum workbooks 1
After flipping through the material, I want to highlight a few interesting elements for these extensive workbooks.

1. Answer Key

I appreciated seeing an answer key in the back of the book. You could easily remove these if you don’t want your child to sneak a peek at the answers, or you could also make great use of them if it is important to you that your child check his or her own work after completing it.

2. Post-Test

I also really liked seeing that each section has a post test in order to determine mastery. This falls exactly in line with what Darah’s school will be doing in first grade, and with what many schools do after subjects are practiced.

The workbooks I have on hand from Spectrum are really high quality and cover the subjects from a variety of different angles. These would be ideal for homeschool classes or for additional practice at home after school, which is how we plan to use them. After looking them over, I’m not the least bit surprised to hear that they are the #1 teacher recommended workbook series. Spectrum workbooks align with state testing standards and can be very helpful when preparing for standardized tests.

You can order workbooks directly from the website, which is very convenient! You can also search by age, subject, or theme with ease. They have thousands of products on the Spectrum website, yet they still provide an easy way to narrow your search down to exactly what you need!

If you’d like to connect with Spectrum and their parent company Carson-Dellosa, follow them on Facebook. That’s a great way to hear about new materials and promotions!

My Favorite Resource for Combating Summer Learning Loss: Summer Bridge Activities

Great Workbooks for School Break Time