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Middle Years Newsletter: May 2020

By Garber, Andrew on May 05, 2020

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Middle Years Newsletter May 2020 COVID-19 Edition

Learning Activities for Tweens and Teens:

Keep your children learning and safely occupied while they’re not in school and can’t hang out with friends. This guide features tween- and teen-friendly activities and challenges, including a bingo card on the back. Editor’s note: Guidelines are changing rapidly. Make sure to follow all local, state, and federal laws and recommendations on social distancing and other practices when using these ideas.

Creative writing:

Motivate your child to enjoy writing with these suggestions.

Free write. Encourage her to set a timer for five minutes and write anything she wants (even if she begins with, “I’m not sure what to write...”). Your tween will probably get on a roll, and she just might want to keep writing when time’s up!

Share responses. Have family members take turns posting a random topic of the week on the refrigerator. Examples: “Predict a 22nd-century technology trend” or “Do you think people should eat only ‘breakfast foods’ for breakfast? Why or why not?” Everyone writes a response to the topic, and you can share them at the end of the week.

Real-world math:
Showing your teen how math relates to her own life—or to things she cares about—is one of the best ways to motivate her to practice. Here are ideas:

Figure out financing. Maybe your teenager wants to buy a used car. Have her compare financing plans. Then, she could create a spreadsheet showing the final cost based on different interest rates and the term (number of months) for repaying a loan.
Explore careers. Perhaps she’s dreaming of being an architect or a fashion designer. There’s a lot of math in those fields, along with many others. Encourage her to sketch her dream house and use art materials and math tools to build a model to scale. Or she might design a skirt and then figure out how much it would cost to buy the materials to make it.

For the rest of the article, and a BINGO game to play at home, be sure to click on the link: Middle Years Newsletter May 2020 COVID-19 Edition