Happy July!
We’ve wrapped up our series on Grace in Home and entered our next series: Grace in Family. We’ll be here through August.
That means our newsletter content over the next 8 weeks will be devoted to all things family.
Also, starting next week, we’ll be featuring TED talks – by kids, for kids – in our weekly Insightful Videos.
This week we’re delving into the ubiquitous summer slide, when kids experience educational set backs due to time away from learning.
Will it be different this year after the strangest school year ever? What can we do to strike a balance between the need for kids to be kids and enjoy summer and the pressure to prepare for the fall? What factors play into the slide and how can they be avoided? Finally, how does Executive Function play into getting back to “normal” for both moms and kids?
We’ll share what the experts have to say in The List. Their insights might surprise you!
We also want to know what’s on your summer reading list? What are you reading? What are the kids into? Leave us a comment below!
The List: 15 Expert Resources for Moms (updated weekly!)
6 skimmable articles to offer perspective on this week’s topic, 8 informative and/or entertaining podcast episodes to make the chores fly by, and 1 insightful video to inspire you to move forward with grace.
📖 6 Skimmable Articles
🎗 Awareness 🏡 Home 🗂 Productivity 🥗 Wellness 🧗 Growth 👨👩👧👧 Family
🗂 Help your kids buy into their own success to get the most out of their summer
“Feel free to give them suggestions or some ideas, but push them to want to be productive or to get the most out of their summer and not have it pass by without doing the things that they wanted to do.”
Read Summer Learning Loss: How to Prevent the Summer Slide by Bonnie Terry, M.Ed., BCET
🥗 Work vs. Play: The summer dilemma
“There are many ways you can help prevent ‘summer brain drain.’ Here are some thoughts on how to put together a summer learning schedule that looks and feels very different from going to school.”
Read Should my child work on school skills over the summer or take a break? by Mark J. Griffin, PhD
🧗🏽♀️ The art of executive function
“According to the urban dictionary, “mommy brain” is “the phenomenon known to mothers where their brains become useless piles of goo after being around their children for too long.” In my world, the useless pile of goo is what remains of my once perfect ability to plan and prioritize, manage my time, sustain attention, and regulate my emotions. In short, my children have devoured my Executive Functions!”
Read Mommy Brain: From Good Executive Functioning To Goo by Melissa Doody
🏡 Make learning fun this summer!
“Whether you’re trying to avoid the dreaded “summer slide” or are just looking for a kid-sized mental tune-up, you need ideas to keep those little scholars’ brains active. These learning activities for kids are so entertaining, they may not even realize how educational they are.”
Read 20 Fun Learning Activities for Kids to Enjoy at Home by Marisa LaScala
🎗 The summer slide is steeper for some
“But even over summer break, students still need educational opportunities so they can return to school strong and ready to learn more. Unfortunately, not all students have the same academic opportunities available to them during the summer.”
Read How to Prevent the Summer Slide and Help Reduce Educational Inequality by waterford.org
👨👩👧👦 Use the summer to brush up on executive function skills
“Working on executive functioning doesn’t need to involve boring projects, long checklists, or tedious tasks that make the kids run. These executive functioning activities can help to improve the skills that translate to better planning, prioritization, and staying on task during day-to-day functional tasks and when back in the classroom.”
Read Improve Executive Functioning Skills this Summer by Colleen Beck
🎧 8 Podcast Episodes
KEY:
📰 Newsletter Topic
👸🏻 Society & Culture
💡 Ideas: Big and Small
🤰🏻 Motherhood
😎 Relax & Escape
🧗 Growth
👨👩👧👧 For the Family
⏭ Series
💣 explicit language
🌭 frank content
⚠️ sensitive topic
📰 “Have you been properly sorted into your Hogwarts house?”
“If so, gather your wand and your invisibility cloak, we’re going back to the castle to play trivia!”
Listen to Family Road Trip Trivia Podcast | Harry Potter Trivia, Again! (15 min)
👸🏻 “TikTok videos are entertaining and sometimes… life-saving”
“Earlier this year, a video on hospital bill cancellation went viral. We speak with the creator to find out how he got into charity care.”
Listen to The Indicator from Planet Money | Can TikTok Cancel Your Hospital Bills? (10 min)
💡 ” It was an experiment that could never be performed in a lab”
“This week, we revisit this fascinating story, told by psychologist Nancy Segal, about the eternal tug between nature and nurture in shaping who we are.”
Listen to Hidden Brain | What Twins Tell Us (28 min)
🤰🏻 “We see birth order play out pretty clearly”
“But is it a bad thing? Is it a thing to fight back against? Is there a way to make the older child less stressed, and the baby maybe a little *more* motivated? And is it a problem if our own birth order has shaped who we are as adults and how we parent?”
Listen to What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood | Birth Order: Can We Fight It? (47 min)
😎 “Every year, fights break out on airplanes”
“They happen between the people who lean back in their seats, and the people who get their knees smooshed. If you think about it, these arguments are the result of confusion.”
Listen to 99% Invisible | Mine! (30 min)
🧗 “Are you able to use this information to optimize your energy (and make that brain happy…)?”
“In this episode of the Happy Brain podcast, Heather discusses whether or not it matters what time you drink your coffee.”
Listen to Tiny Leaps, Big Changes | HB: Drink Coffee at 10:30 for More Energy (8 min)
👨👩👧👦 “Tax-collecting sheriffs used to force people to pay money to a king”
“These days our tax system works a bit differently. We get to vote for people who’ll spend that money on things we care about — like schools and libraries, health care for elderly people, police, parks, sewers and so on.”
Listen to Million Bazillion | Taxes pay for the things we care about (22 min)
⏭ “Where everything went wrong for childcare in America”
“Gloria digs into the shame, guilt, and divisions baked into our earliest day nurseries, and reveals how old-fashioned gender norms and blatant racism killed promising federally-funded, early childcare programs. “
Listen to No One is Coming to Save Us | Birth of a Broken System | 2 (63 min)
🎬 Insightful Video
Closing the Gap on the Summer Slump
“In the US, most kids have a very long summer break, during which they forget an awful lot of what they learned during the school year. This “summer slump” affects kids from low-income neighborhoods most, setting them back almost three months. TED Fellow Karim Abouelnaga has a plan to reverse this learning loss. Learn how he’s helping kids improve their chances for a brighter future.”
Watch A summer school kids actually want to attend | Karim Abouelnaga | TED (7:05)
That’s The List for this week!
Do you have go-to tips to prevent the summer slide… or a take away from this week’s list? How about any book suggestions for moms and/or kids!? Drop us a note in the comments.
As always, we hope our newsletter inspires you to get your ship together and get through your week with grace.
Have a good one and please reach out if we can be helpful to you in any way!
Love & Grace,
Rachel & Amanda
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🎧 Podcast Playlist 7/7/21