MLB Summer Slugger program could ease the challenge of homeschooling

As parents face the challenges of homeschooling during the stay-at-home orders issued across the country, Major League Baseball has released a summer program that just might help.

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MLB set up the online “Summer Slugger” program in 2017 in partnership with EVERFI, a social impact digital learning tech company, to support parents and educators of children in grades to 3-5. The program is aimed at continuing its participants’ education throughout the summer in hopes of helping them avoid the “summer slide” when school resumes in the fall.

Melanie LeGrande, vice president of social responsibility for MLB, explains.

“We wanted kids to be able to retain their science skills, their math skills, their English skills in a time when they are not typically in school,” she said. “A lot of times when kids are out of school they come back in the fall and they have lost 2.5 months of learning.”

The loss of learning can lead to remediation at the start of a school year for students who don’t have access to continuing education in the summer months. These students in particular were on the minds of those who created the program.

“A lot of kids especially in certain situations don’t have access to tutors, parents who are at home to say ‘Hey, two hours of reading today,'” LeGrande pointed out. “So what we have done is really infuse the game of baseball into a ‘game’ kids will think is a game but it really is surreptitiously a way to get them to retain those smart skills so they can start the school year in the right direction.”

The program consists of 36 baseball-based lessons or ‘games’ designed to be carried out over an 18-week period. While each lesson is short and requires only about 10 minutes, there is a course flow and structure that covers various topics in math, English and science.

“It’s very adaptive,” said LeGrande. “It adapts to the grade of the student, it adapts to the skill set of the student and it helps them. It is reactive to how they do. It gives them harder questions the more they get right and sometimes comes back to them with similar questions if they need some help in determining how to move forward on those existing programs.”

The program also incorporates the student’s favorite team as parents can sign up for team-specific programs.

“It was important for us to think about how to engage fans, how to support educational outcomes, but in the end just really make sure students have what they need to be successful,” said LeGrande.

Baseball can go far as an educational tool. Science and math are critical to the game on and off the field. There are history lessons to be learned and stories to be written. While this is just one summer program, the possibility for more exists.

“It’s so much more than a game,” said LeGrande. “Our sport just gives you the opportunity to do so much more. To be a major league citizen, to be thinking about Jackie Robinson where you are thinking about your character education, to think about Roberto Clemente. There are so many heroes that you can learn from and there’s so many aspects of the sport that allow you to get all of the academics you need out of it.”

More on the Summer Slugger can be found here. The access code for the Mariners is “mariners.”

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