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School’s out.
But empty classrooms don’t translate into eight upcoming weeks of carefree fun around the house or hanging out with friends for 21st-century children.
Some kids will take remedial classes this summer to keep them on track with English language learning goals or other subjects. Others will attend sports team practices or other activities. Still others will juggle jobs, and somewhere between study, work and sports a little room will be set aside for fun.
Summertime once meant endless days spent running around with friends, playing street games and huddling around a basement black-and-white television set to watch Vincent Price movies on rainy days. Summer turned every day into Saturday and Sunday and in June and July, Labor Day looked as distant as a mountain viewed across a vast plain.
Those idyllic times have shrunk under increased pressure from schools focused on comprehensive testing and high-technology gadgets that pull kids away from blue-sky days, tree climbing, frog catching and ghost stories.
Kids will always be kids. But how many proposals for increased study time and ramped-up school-to-work experience will it take to shrink summer into a time period resembling spring vacation or Christmas break?
Kids need time away from classrooms and structure. But the days of letting them run around the empty lot at the end of the block or bicycle down to Main Street have gone the way of Norman Rockwell.
The city of Lynn and the School Department devised a great way a few years ago to balance fun and learning for kids of all ages and family incomes. Project LEARN, based at Lynn Vocational Technical Institute, is a summer program that spanned several weeks during the summer and gave kids the opportunity to spend their mornings learning and their afternoons playing.
The classroom activities covered subjects students were required to master for the new school year. But they also offered kids a chance to explore topics touched on briefly during the academic year. The afternoon recreation activities were scattered across city parks and playgrounds.
LEARN gave kids the opportunity to enjoy structured fun, while staying partially tuned in to school. The program gave parents a break mentally and financially while still allowing kids to spend a few weeks on vacation before September.
It takes money to make a project like LEARN work and education dollars get stretched thinner and thinner by the demands placed on them by modern curriculums. But a program like LEARN packed a lot of bang for the buck and instilled in kids a valuable lesson: There is no need to take a vacation from learning, the trick is to make it fun.
