Composing a Summer Reading List for Your Kids

Whether you are a parent or an educator, it is essential to keep the kids reading through the summer. Summer learning loss is a real thing, and if your child does not pick up many books during these next few months, their literacy skills will start to shrink rather rapidly quickly. On the other hand, if we can keep the children actively reading, their literacy skills may be more robust when school starts back up. 

Create a Summer Reading List… with Help!
Rather than sit down on your own and write down titles of books that you would like your children to read, you first need to figure out how to make them excited about reading during the summer.

When children get to participate in deciding on options, they are more likely to respond enthusiastically. This is needed when talking about a summer reading list! After all, who can blame your child for being less than excited about reading during their off-time from school? If they don’t look at reading as personal enjoyment, they will think of it as homework during the summer. 

Ways to Approach It
Take your child, or your whole class of students, to a library with fully stacked shelves. Give each child an index card and ask them to write down five titles of books that they think would be interesting to read. As an adult, you also write down five titles of books you think the child would enjoy. During the summer, alternate between the two lists so the child will read one of their choices and then one of yours. Proceed until all the books have been finished (if there is time). 

Another option would be actually to order books for the child to keep. It is an excellent way to have them start building their bedroom library! You can visit a book store to do this, or Amazon always has plenty of books to choose from with plenty of reviews to read before the purchase. 

How to Test the Child’s Comprehension
Reading the book is just half of it. The other half is determining if the child completely understands what they are reading. If your kid enjoys technology, have them create a book report through various presentation apps. It could be a video book report, something similar to PowerPoint, or just the old-fashioned word document. 

If there is a film made about the book, the two of you can sit down and compare and contrast the similarities and differences between the two. After all, comprehension is more than just retelling the story. It is about being able to look at the whole picture, and that could be summarizing, predicting, making inferences, visualizing, determining the problems and solutions, and various other strategies. 

Ask a Professional for Help If Needed
If you are a parent and in the midst of summer with your child flying through their summer reading list and need some ideas or assistance in determining if their comprehension is on point, iAchieve offers tutors for all subject areas and grade levels. We can lend a hand and determine if your child is proceeding with strong comprehension abilities!

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