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Teaching Tips

5 Tips for Preventing the Summer Slide

May 2, 2019

by: LWT staff

3 minutes

The average student loses a month of academic-calendar learning each summer. Your kids don’t have to be the average student! Keyboarding Without Tears® makes it easy to prevent the summer slide with a strong keyboarding school-to-home connection. Here are some small ways you can make a BIG change in the amount of information your students retain through the summer.

#1 Set Up Success for Students at Home 
Make sure your students have access to any web-based applications they are using during the school year. At Keyboarding Without Tears, we provide this backpack letter to ensure keyboarding students have what they need to log in from home. 

#2 Check-in on Progress
View Reports in Plus Live Insights to find student- and class-level data and share with families, so they are aware of where students are at the end of the year. This will help families gauge how much to practice over the summer in order to retain skills.

#3 Use Our "Can Use at Home" Feature

Keyboarding Without Tears has a Can Use at Home feature that easily allows students access to all their favorite cross-curricular, game-based activities from their own home. With the Can Use at Home feature, you can select to allow your students to access their keyboarding license at home. Before school lets out for the summer, email your students’ parents their child's login information to encourage at-home practice. 

#4 Cultivate Daily Typing Practice with Creative Activities

Provide additional keyboarding activities by asking students to type a sentence or paragraph about what they’re looking forward to this summer. This will show how well they’ve learned to type automatically. Allowing students time to write about their future swimming, biking, or camping experiences will give them practice with independent typing through the summer.

#5 If You Can Hear it, You Can Type it!

The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plains. Beyond independent typing with creative prompts, it’s also important for children to practice typing from dictation. While every student might not grow up to become a transcriptionist, it’s vital for children to learn to type so they will be comfortable taking notes on a computer. A new feature of Keyboarding Without Tears allows teachers and parents to develop students’ note-taking skills as they type what they hear from audio prompts. Check back soon for updates and a new video featuring ideas to inspire. 

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