Summer Reading Challenge

Are you excited for the summer break?

Summer break has finally arrived, and I have no doubt that your children are just as excited as you! This season is such a perfect time for both you and your child to reset and refresh. My kids get so excited to ‘put the workbooks’ away so they can focus on all the important summer activities. Their favourites include:  Jumping on the trampoline, swimming in the lake, toasting marshmallows, sleeping in late and watching their favourite show. The last thing your child probably wants to do is focus on summer learning. So, what’s one way you can get your children to maintain their reading skills? How about a Summer Reading Challenge?

First let’s look at some facts about reading:

Reading over the summer is extremely important. According to Oxford Learning, 2 months of reading for your student, are lost over the summer. And in the fall, 6 weeks are spent re-learning old material. That’s intense! Obviously, you don’t want your child to lose those learning skills that they worked so hard to obtain during the school year. So, on today’s blog we are just going to focus on reading. (Stay tuned for a future Schoolio blog where we will tackle summer learning.) If 2 months of reading is lost over the summer then this reading challenge is the perfect way to remedy that.

What’s the Summer Reading Challenge?

It only takes 2-3 hours of reading per week to prevent summer learning loss! The challenge is absolutely perfect for this! How does it work? Well, Lindsey created this amazing Summer Reading Challenge chart for your child to use! Every day your child will spend just 30 minutes reading a book of their choosing. It doesn’t need to be a solid 30 minutes. It can be sections of 10 minutes throughout the day (if their attention span can’t manage 30 minutes straight). If your child is a reluctant reader or has learning challenges, you can make each square a different value (for example: 15 minutes per square or levelled readers). And if your child is a voracious reader, try challenging them with one hour of reading per day!

If your child can read for 30 minutes a day over the summer, that adds up to 2,100 minutes of reading! 2,100 minutes of reading translates to 35 hours. That works out to about 3 hours a week over the summer!

Not only is your child accomplishing something fun by doing the challenge, they are also getting 3 hours per week of amazing reading time! And, we know that in order for them to maintain their reading skills over the summer they need 2-3 hours a week! So, this is perfect!

Choosing books they’ll enjoy reading.

What type of books is does your child enjoy reading? There are so many different types of choose from. Action/adventure, classics, comic books/graphic novels, detective/mystery, fantasy, historical fiction and the list goes on and on. And with each genre, comes thousands of books to choose from! Don’t worry, you don’t need to purchase all of these books. Check your local library for availability of the books that your child wants to read this summer.

Our team at Schoolio has compiled an awesome Chapter Book list for kids based on age and genre. 

You can download the reading list below! 

Beginning the Summer Reading Challenge.

Explain to your child what the challenge is. Maybe put a reward incentive in if your child is more hesitant. Like, “We will get ice cream at your favourite ice cream shop when you’ve completed the chart!” Make sure to tell them that they will be entered into win a prize from Schoolio! Help them make a fun list of books they might like to read over the summer! Try to avoid making it another ‘chore’ or ‘to-do’. Get excited with your kids and have fun!