This is a sponsored post on behalf of Legends of Learning, however all opinions remain 100% ours.
Have you heard of “summer slide”? Every teacher reading this is shuddering, because summer slide accounts for a good portion of stress of the back to school season for educators. As a parent and someone who helps teach in our co-op school, I’m shuddering right along with you, teacher friends.
So, what is summer slide? The phrase refers to the loss of mental knowledge after a summer spent neglecting studies. In many cases, skills the kids mastered in spring must be retaught in the fall in order to catch back up so they can move along in their studies. As you can imagine, this is a huge waste of time for educators, and for students.
Just like your muscles that burn following your first gym class after a long break, returning to school each fall is a rough transition to those who haven’t been regularly honing their skills all summer long. According to research from the Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University, students typically lose one to two months of reading and math skills during the summer break because they are not regularly exercising their brains.
So, how can you get your class back up to speed and start the school year off on the right foot? By utilizing programs that make learning so much fun that kids will be eager to dive back in. Playing games can be extremely rich learning environments, and the games and lessons on Legends of Learning are some of the very best.
At our school, we have the math and reading apps covered thanks to generous donations from our community, but up until this spring we didn’t have any science learning games to offer to the kids. Then I found Legends of Learning, an education based program developed specifically for teachers and their students to explore and enhance their science curriculum.
Legends of Learning was developed using rigorous content quality testing processes that included teachers, external curriculum experts, and their own internal academic team. Each group of games is reviewed to match the content standard, whether it is based on NGSS {Next Generation Science Standards} or specific state standards. And, because they value their users, they give an opportunity for educators and students to rate each title after playing it to give feedback to the developers and other users.
After playing with Legends of Learning for the past few months, I am a big fan. It is easy to navigate, has different grade levels available to choose from, and has content that is relevant to our studies. Even better, it is entirely free for us to experience first hand for teachers and for students.
Super easy. Super fun.
It’s super easy to get started, you simply set up a free teacher’s account, then you can add students and pre-load some games for them to try. You can also create playlists, giving kids a specific game track they can follow that directly correlates to their studies, or you can let them freeplay games you have specifically selected.
After they finish your specific curriculum, they can also earn freeplay time, all of which you can see in your teacher dashboard. The dashboard allows you to easily track progress of each child playing and see what they are learning at any given time with just a glance. I love the teacher dashboard because it’s so easy to see what they are struggling with and what they have mastered so I can suggest other games to enhance their learning.
The dashboard coupled with the playlist feature on Legends of Learning has been my best friend this summer as I’ve been trying to match games to what we’re reading and doing. The playlist is especially nice because it gives me a visual of how long each game takes to play. This allows me to select games based on our studies that fit within our screentime window and allow the kids to progressively move up to harder games as they play.
As for the kids, they have had absolutely no trouble navigating through the system to find the games I had launched for them or finding playlists I created. I was surprised at how quickly they figured out how each game worked and I love how they work together to solve problems. Watching them learn new games throughout the summer and bond while playing has been really fun, and I love how effortless the whole process has been.
The jury is still out on whether we are going to experience summer slide, but as of now we’re all really enjoying playing and learning together. Since Legends of Learning is set up specifically so it’s easy to find games that are directly correlated to enhance curriculum, we’ve been having fun choosing different games based on our own summer adventures, and that has been a big hit around here.
Our summer so far has been spent gardening, growing, and spending time in nature, so our choices of games on Legends of Learning have been very Life Science in focus. Even though we supplement our learning with texts and books from the library, I can already see a huge benefit to combining hands-on learning with fun and exciting games the kids can play all on their own.
I know I was really surprised that I even learned a few things while playing Legends of Learning that we hadn’t covered in the textbooks. Seeing the kids experience that and be able to articulate how this new knowledge relates to their schoolwork throughout the year makes me incredibly happy, and I’m glad I’m able to share this with them. I love that they get excited to play and then not want to stop even after their specific playlists are finished, and I love how I can see what each child is working on even if they are spending their time in freeplay.
It was really cool being able to watch their progress in my account and see what they were doing with real-time information at my fingertips. Knowing that they were playing learning games that directly related to our summer lessons made me so happy, and I loved hearing them process things in new ways that made it truly fun to learn.
Sign up for Legends of Learning for your class
Are you an educator? If so, you need to sign up for a FREE account today and see how you can utilize Legends of Learning as a learning tool for your classroom for an even better understanding of science related subjects. Even if you’re not an educator, I’m sure you know a few Legends of Learning that could benefit from a free game-based learning program to use in their classroom, right? Do that super hero a solid and make sure you tell them all about Legends of Learning and how it can enhance science curriculum for their students.
Sign up for Legends of Learning and make a free account today.