Spring Break – Opportunities for Learning

Next week begins Spring Break for the Greene County schools and many other school districts in the state. Our students and staff will have one week to rest, relax and re-energize, returning on April 9, to complete our school year. But Spring Break is also an opportunity for our parents to help extend the learning of their students; and it is a great opportunity to maximize family time.

I urge parents not to lose the time that Spring Break offers to plan additional activities for student and family learning. If you stay in the county next week, plan day trips for your children. These day trips could start out early in the morning taking sack lunches made at home, and ending early in the afternoon with a return home. The day trips can take students to historic sites in Greensboro, Atlanta, and/or other places within an hour or two driving distance. Day trips allow families to spend time together and also allow students and families to visit a place they have not visited before. Certainly, trips that are longer than a day are great too – they usually take more planning and many times, more money.

The most important part of the trips would be to make certain that you have conversations with your children. Ask your children what they think about the shape of a rock or some plant you might see when you are walking or hiking; ask them why they think the Aquarium in downtown Atlanta was designed that way or why the fish at the Aquarium have such bright colors and why some fish don’t; ask them how they think the dinosaur was put together in the Fernbank Museum of Natural History.

These are good questions to start your conversations with your children. I suggest starting with your own questions, because our children have natural curiosities and there will be more. I encourage good stimulating conversations with children and of course, spending a lot of time listening to what they have to say. In my experience, that is the best way to learn – listening to children.

The best part of the day trip is the return home. This is time for recapping the day and going over what you saw and what was learned. You can also begin the wind down talking about what you will eat for dinner, who will help with the cooking, and who will help with clean-up.

Spring Break can be more than a time of sleeping late every morning and students being bored all day because there is nothing fun to do. It can be a time when families cook meals together; students learn how to prepare a meal, hem a skirt or hem those much too long pants. It can be a time when families talk about the books they have read or want to read; it can be a time when the family sits down to play a game of UNO, checkers or learns to play scrabble; it can be a time for learning how to take pictures of what we did all week using a disposable camera and then to make your very own scrapbook rather than purchasing one.

The biggest enhancer for student learning, motivation and success is having real life experiences. It doesn’t mean that we need to take our children to an island for the week to learn about other cultures. Don’t get me wrong, that is a great spring break trip. However, if you cannot go to an island, think about a family trip to the library and selecting books to take home to READ; think about taking a day trip to Athens to see what a great university looks like. Above all, talk to your children, and listen to what they have to say to you. Spend time enhancing your child’s learning, it is one of the many ways you can help us educate, inspire, challenge and support our students. Remember, it’s all about the children.