Summer Loss Can Be a Real Thing
How to make sure your children return to school in the fall
having advanced or remained steady in their skills not dropped in reading levels.
As educators, we need to ask ourselves what we can do to ensure all of our students advance their reading level during the summer.
Summer usually presents unique opportunities for learning: traveling, camping, visiting relatives and friends, swimming lessons, educational camps, etc.
Summer is also a time when we hopefully can slow down and catch our breath. We relish quiet, peaceful times. We enjoy relaxing visits to grandma and grandpa’s house. We delight in the time when we’re having fun baking, drawing, playing, and reading with our children at a much slower pace.
We value and appreciate these gifts of summer so much so that it makes it difficult to pull ourselves and our children away to focus on their reading, writing and spelling skills.
I know this. I’ve been in your shoes.
I also know THIS:
Struggling readers, writers and spellers especially must not experience a lapse in routine, review and practice over summer vacation. Their need for a predictable schedule that continues to reinforce and grow their skills cannot be overlooked.
A daily routine of 30–180 minutes of reading aloud, reading silently, reading sight word cards, reviewing the previous school year’s worksheets and subject content is critical to prevent summer loss.
I always end the school year by giving multiple suggestions and materials to parents to help maintain and advance their child’s skills over the summer. For further summer support, my summer emails share multiple fun and interesting ideas for engaging children’s language arts skills as summer progresses. I check in from time to time with parents to encourage them to continue striving towards their goal that their children will experience no summer loss.
When tutoring begins in the fall, I ask my students’ parents about the reading, writing and spelling activities their child engaged in during the summer.
I ask if their child read a book or books over the summer, reviewed their papers from last school year, practiced their sight word cards, and/or did other reading, writing and spelling activities such as writing plays and journaling their summer explorations.
My students whose skills remained solid and my students who advanced a reading level practiced language arts skills plus they challenged themselves to read challenging books. Many parents actively participated in practicing their child’s reading, writing and spelling skills consistently with their children. Parents and children alike bubbled over with eagerness to share what they did over the summer.
One of my goals when I wrote Phonetic Reading with Silent Elephant “e” was to write a reading program that prevents summer loss.
I am so pleased that this goal has come to fruition.
Here’s another wonderful indicator of the power of learning reading, writing and spelling skills with Silent Elephant “e” - my students who have graduated from the program are flying with success in school.
When they graduate from me, they are two to four grade levels ahead in reading!
I know I don’t have to worry about summer loss with them, because they are doing so well in school and loving language arts so much that they read and write all of the time.
I do know this, because I get lots of phone calls, letters and texts from my Silent Elephant “e” graduates and their parents. We miss each other so much after developing such a caring, rewarding bond that we need to keep in touch!
If you have further questions about summer activities, feel free to contact us.