Vacations, Day Trips – Have fun and learn something at the same time!
Need some great recommendations?
It’s July and you may still be thinking about a summer vacation with the kids. If you haven’t already got your summer plans all set, and you’d like to do something fun and educational, we’ve got some great ideas for you.
Whether you plan to pack up the RV and hit the road, or you want to drive/fly to a specific destination, these are some of our favorite spots that are fascinating for young and old travelers alike. read more…
Thinking it’s too late for summer school?
Some schools have already launched their summer school programs, and if you didn’t get signed up, you may have missed the window of opportunity. And there’s also a good chance that the summer programs near you were filled up, and your child may be on a waiting list and has missed out.
If either of these scenarios apply to your student, you can still provide a learning experience that will have a positive impact on your student’s academic performance by signing up for some online tutoring this summer. Learning loss from COVID is evident across the country. Summer learning loss just compounds the problem. So to make sure your student gets an academic boost instead of an academic loss, dedicating a bit of summer vacation time to tutoring is a great idea.
It’s July and you may still be thinking about a summer vacation with the kids. If you haven’t already got your summer plans all set, and you’d like to do something fun and educational, we’ve got some great ideas for you.
Whether you plan to pack up the RV and hit the road, or you want to drive/fly to a specific destination, these are some of our favorite spots that are fascinating for young and old travelers alike.
Glen Rose, TX
Dinosaur Valley State Park in Glen Rose, Texas features actual footprints of the dinosaurs that once roamed the entire central Texas area. These are some of the best preserved dinosaur tracks in the world. In the riverbed, you can walk in the footprints left by Sauropods and three-toed Theropods. There’s a 70-foot tall Apatosaurus and a 45-foot tall Tyrannosaurus Rex to greet you at the entrance to the park. The area is home to many hiking and biking trails, great fishing spots, and multiple places to ride horses.
Nearby is the Fossil Rim Wildlife Center, which is an 1,800 acre endangered species research and conservation center. There are over 1,000 animals from 50+ species and you can tour the center in your car or in a guided tour jeep or safari vehicle. There’s a children’s animal center where kids can get hands on, and there’s an on-site café and Lodge, cabins, and a bunkhouse for those who want to stay overnight.
Waco, TX
Keeping with the dinosaur and fossil theme, about an hour away from Glen Rose is the Waco Mammoth National Monument. This National Park Service site is home to fossils of 24 Columbian mammoths and other mammals from the Pleistocene Epoch. This is the nation’s first and only recorded evidence of a nursery of ice age Columbian mammoths. While you’re there, be sure to visit the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum and the Dr Pepper Museum.
Santa Fe, NM
Among the many amazing, educational, and fun places to visit in Santa Fe, you’ll find the Museum of International Folk Art which is home to the world’s largest collection of folk art. For a memorable side trip, families should visit the Taos Pueblo, built by Anasazi Indians over 1,000 years ago and still home to Puebloan people. This is one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States. Of course, you’ll have to make time to visit the Santa Fe Children’s Museum and the fascinating Harrell House Bug Museum.
Nashville, TN
Planning a trip to Music City? Be sure to visit the 42-foot replica of Athena at the Parthenon and learn a bit about Greek mythology and the early history of Nashville. You can also visit the Nashville Zoo which has recently opened a state-of-the-art animal hospital with a public viewing area so you can watch actual veterinary procedures. You can learn about the award-winning Fisk Jubilee Singers at the historically black Fisk University. The National Museum of African American Music is a new venue in Music City that just opened. Your visit to Nashville needs to include Belle Meade Plantation to learn about the history of horse breeding, and visit the historic Civil War battlefield at Franklin. Although this is a kid-friendly property, the Journey to Jubilee history of slavery which provides visitors with an understanding of what the times were like from the African-American viewpoint, is not recommended for kids under 12.
San Diego, CA
The world-famous San Diego Zoo is a great destination for the whole family, featuring 100 acres housing over 12,000 animals of more than 650 species. The Japanese Friendship Garden is a cultural center that educates, engages, and inspires people of diverse backgrounds about Japanese culture and community legacy. Old Town features 15 historic buildings, shops and a trolley tour. And older kids will be thrilled by a tour of Whaley House Museum, featured on the Travel Channel’s America’s Most Haunted.
Cooperstown, NY
Summer is baseball season, and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown is a great spot to visit. Cooperstown also features the Fenimore Art Museum (former estate of author James Fenimore Cooper), free lawn concerts by the Glimmerglass Opera, a petting zoo at the Farmers Museum, and nearby lake Otesaga for swimming, boating, and picnicking.
For tons more educational places to visit this summer, check out these great lists:
Statistics show that 79% of schools are offering online summer school classes in the wake of the pandemic. The percentage of students who enroll in summer school has been steadily increasing every year since they started tracking it in 1985, and the percentage of high school students enrolled is now approaching 50%.
Something that you may not be aware of is that more than 97% of top universities offer summer programs for high school students, and some even offer programs for middle school children.
In addition, online summer school during the pandemic can help to prevent loss of 50% of math gains and prevent 30% of loss in reading gains.
Further, students in all grades can benefit from summer school, not just high schoolers. Kindergarteners and first graders who attended summer school outperformed their peers. And the benefits from attending summer school persist. One year later, there is still a 13% benefit for students in the subject they studied in summer school.
What if it’s too late to enroll in summer school?
Some schools have already launched their summer school programs, and if you didn’t get signed up, you may have missed the window of opportunity. And there’s also a good chance that the summer programs near you were filled up, and your child may be on a waiting list and has missed out.
If either of these scenarios apply to your student, you can still provide a learning experience that will have a positive impact on your student’s academic performance by signing up for some online tutoring this summer. Learning loss from COVID is evident across the country. Summer learning loss just compounds the problem. So to make sure your student gets an academic boost instead of an academic loss, dedicating a bit of summer vacation time to tutoring is a great idea.
Tutoring is flexible
Summer school has a set schedule, even when it’s presented in an online format. Tutoring, on the other hand, is completely flexible to fit your family’s schedule. Are you going to be out of town for a while? Do you have other schedule conflicts that make summer school impossible? Or do you just want your student to spend a couple of hours each week on educational activities so they’re not giving up their whole vacation on “school stuff”? Schedule tutoring when it’s convenient for your family.
Does your student need some one-on-one help with summer school?
Summer tutoring is the perfect support for the student who is enrolled in summer school and may be having a bit of difficulty keeping up with the accelerated pace. In order to cover material that normally gets covered in a full semester, summer school courses, especially at the high school level, can be a real challenge. One-on-one tutoring, even just an hour or two per week, can help your student keep up with summer school demands.
TutorUp offers 30-minute tutoring sessions
You can purchase tutoring sessions this summer that are 30 minutes long, or combine sessions to get an hour of tutoring, or 90 minutes… whatever works. All of our tutors are certified, experienced, background-checked classroom teachers who know how to connect with students. Just type in your contact info below so we can chat with you about your child’s specific needs, or give us a call to find out how you can get your student learning on your schedule and your budget this summer.
It’s no secret—by far the most requested subject for tutoring is math. This is true at all grade levels, but especially in the upper grades. Why is this? Is math just that much more difficult than all the other subjects?
The state of math education in the United States
Education in the United States is not standardized across the country. Each state has its own standards and requirements, and each school district within the state sets its own curriculum. Dr. Jo Boaler is the Nomellini-Olivier Professor of Mathematics Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. She is a passionate promoter of mathematics reform, and she says that math is the subject “with the most damaging ideas held by teachers, students, and parents.” According to Dr. Boaler, students decide early on if they are a “math person” or they’re not. And this designation lasts into adulthood.
Since US students rank lower in math scores than the global average, there has been a lot of attention paid to how math is taught here. Students in most Asian countries, along with Russia, Ireland, England, the UAE, Latvia, Norway, Lithuania, Austria, and the Netherlands all rank higher on the TIMSS mathematics scale.
Some feel, along with Dr. Boaler, that the two main reasons for this are 1) we lack consensus on the goals of K-12 math education, and 2) we lack consensus on how to define and measure success of math education.
What are schools doing about it?
According to Dr. Heather Hill, Jerome T. Murphy Professor in Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education, “Efforts to improve K-8 mathematics instruction have been a consistent feature of the education policy landscape for the past three decades, from the revised state mathematics standards of the 1990s to the Common Core educational standards enacted in 2010.” For the past three years, Dr. Hill, along with some of her colleagues, has been collecting evidence on U.S. mathematics instruction.
They have found that teachers’ mathematical knowledge has improved over time, and more teachers (19%) are using standards-aligned curriculum materials. However these findings represent what she calls “modest” gains. The vast majority of teachers are not using standards-aligned curriculum materials, and there are many reasons for that, including weak incentives. It took a while to get math education into its current condition, and it will take a while to get us out of it.
Since Common Core was first adopted in 2010, there were 46 states which eventually adopted the standards in their schools. However since then, 16 states have either withdrawn from the curriculum or are in the process of withdrawing, and 4 states never adopted it. “There is no evidence that the standards had a significant, positive impact on student achievement” according to Tom Loveless, former Brookings Expert and author of the recently released Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core.
What can parents do?
Parents who have tried to help their students in math have been frustrated by the generation gap in how math is taught. No longer able to rely on “how we used to do it”, parents are finding that even elementary level math is unfamiliar and somewhat daunting. Hence, math has become the most requested subject for tutoring.
One-on-one tutoring with a certified classroom teacher who is familiar with how math is taught in your state can have the greatest impact on your child’s success in math. In a classroom environment, the teacher has very little time to work individually with any student, and kids are often reluctant to ask for help because they don’t want to risk looking “stupid” in front of their peers.
Some tutoring companies use college students or subject-matter-experts who are good in math to do their math tutoring. The weakness in this approach is that these tutors are not trained educators. It’s one thing to be great at a certain subject but it’s another thing altogether to be able to evaluate, assess, educate, and adapt in order to help a struggling student improve.
That’s why all of the tutors at TutorUp are certified, experienced, background-checked classroom teachers who only work one-on-one with students to provide the personalized support your child needs to be successful. If your child is one of the many who could use some personalized time with a teacher to help them improve in math, let us know. We can help.
