Students? educations will suffer because of our failure to control COVID-19

In those homes, the activities that get kids acclimated to schooling and learning are more likely to continue, Gibbs says. “Those gaps are just going to widen.” Even outside of developing early skills, like recognizing letters, that help build hard knowledge, kids who aren’t able to be in a kindergarten classroom will lose out on social and emotional growth, Gibbs says. Even if it’s possible to bring kids’ learning back up to speed after the pandemic, the social element will be harder to reestablish.One of the most important things for children’s early learning is developing close and trusting relationships with their teachers and other adults outside the home, Gibbs says. “When kids come back, I think teachers will come back to a classroom with bigger differences in where kids are.” There could be ways to augment an online school semester for students in elementary school, Gibbs says. Like elementary school kids, the extended summer means middle school students are likely returning to school this year with more summer learning loss than they normally do. Kids tend to lose less of what they learned during the school year as they get older, so middle schoolers may not have as much extra ground to make up as elementary school students, but it’s still a factor. Middle school students are more equipped to keep learning online than elementary school kids, Robnolt says, so she’s not as concerned about their ability to keep up with reading and literacy. Middle school, though, is when students start to develop science literacy skills, says Sameer Honwad, an assistant professor of learning and instruction at the University of Buffalo. “I’m running a summer program right now with high school kids, and we told them, ‘Okay, collaborate on Zoom,’ and they figured it out,” Honwad says.