Student Resources

Happy summer, students! While you are enjoying more time to play and relax, please set time aside each day to practice your reading and math skills. You have worked hard this past year to learn these skills, and it would be a shame to lose them over the summer. Be prepared to start next school year right where you left off, without having to catch up again!

Click the links above to find links that your teachers and Mr. Thaxton have posted for you.

Have a fun, restful, and learning-filled summer!

A WORD TO PARENTS:

Summer is a time to play, but it is also often a time for students to lose many of skills they worked so hard to gain in school. “Summer Learning Loss” is common and well-documented. Research shows that on average, students’ math scores are two months lower after summer than before. Students with reading disabilities tend to lose more than two months on their reading scores over the summer break.

Several aspects of this are particularly troubling.

• Such loss not only negates some time and effort of the previous year, but it consumes time from the following year as well, since concepts and skills must be retaught. Two months of loss in skills, then, can actually cost four months of school instruction.
• For students whose learning progresses at a slower-than-average rate, a two-month drop in grade-level scores represents an even greater portion of the school year lost.
• While students with reading disabilities commonly lose reading skills over the summer, their peers who are strong readers often gain skills over the summer as they continue to read. This means the knowledge gap becomes even more significant.
• These losses impede us from reaching long-term academic goals. For example, de Paul’s goal to move more students into Algebra instruction by Team 8 is hampered when we must devote the first months of each year to the previous year’s concepts.

To address these concerns, our school is calling families to action. Mr. Thaxton and classroom teachers have organized these summer resources for de Paul parents and their children. We strongly encourage you to create a daily scheduled time for the student to read and practice his/her skills. Even if your family is traveling, remember to bring along books to read and to access these websites if the internet is available. Let’s make it a mutual goal to close achievement gaps over the summer rather than see them grow.

We wish the best for you and your child this summer!