Summer Smarts 1st Grade: Activities in Math, Science, Language Arts, & Social Studies to Prepare Students for 1st Grade by Jeanne Crane Castafero & Janet Van Roden
90 pages	Kingfisher	April 2007	Paperback

Summer Smarts 1st Grade by Jeanne Crane Castafero and Janet Van Roden is a workbook filled with activities that address many of the issues first graders will encounter.

The idea here is to minimize summer learning loss by reinforcing skills that students have learned throughout the school year. If students do not participate in reading and educational activities during summer vacation, they can forget many of the important skill sets they have learned, creating an unnecessary gap in their achievement. Teachers, researchers, and those involved with children will all tell you that doing some work at home during vacations helps to limit this loss.

The activities in the book each fill a single page: you and your child can do as many or as few as you choose. Also, many of the sheets are entertaining or unique. These are all important features with young children, whose attention spans are short. Summer Smarts 1st Grade also includes subjects that many other books forget: problem-solving skills, inference, history, and geography, for example. It includes work you can do with outside literature, a sheet to practice penmanship, and an answer key, so kids can check their own work – if your child loves to play "pretend" school, this is an ideal workbook.

Since the authors don’t intend that the book be used independently by a child, it does seem a little advanced for some just-coming-out-of-kindergarten students. You certainly don’t want learning to be a frustrating experience, particularly for such young kids, so make sure you use your own pace and judgment about what your child can handle. Also remember to use this book as an accessory to – rather than a staple of- your child’s summer. The social, physical and emotional skills learned through play are just as vital to the development of your child as the more academic skills. With your help, or if your child can read and write (on a beginner/intermediary first-grade level) and follow printed directions, then Summer Smarts 1st Grade can be a wonderful resource for them.