Sweet, Sweet Summertime Reading

Encouraging Kids to Stay with the Books

(The Council Chronicle, May 10, 2005)
 
Reading throughout the summer is important. In fact, it’s probably best for students to read at least four to five books over the summer to keep their reading skills sharp.

Equally important is encouraging a desire to read. Ways to approach this include: making presentations about books, giving students a choice in what they read, finding ways for students to connect with books and others, and ensuring students have access to books before summer begins.

The following article provides some ideas for energizing summer reading and gives a glimpse into what some schools across the country are doing with summer reading and writing.  

Encouraging Students to Read 
 
Although he says there’s not a lot of research on the point, Richard Allington cites a study by Jimmy Kim that found students should read at least four to five books over the summer months in order to keep their skills strong. If they read any fewer than that, they will probably lose ground, summarizes Allington, who is professor of education at the University of Tennessee and author of What Really Matters for Struggling Readers: Designing Research-Based Programs and co-author of Classrooms that Work: They Can ALL Read and Write.

As for motivating students to read over the summer, Allington says that choice is an important factor. He supports allowing students to choose what they want to read, “at least within reason.” As validation for this viewpoint, he points to a meta-analysis of classroom reading instruction that he says “shows having access to interesting texts, choice, and collaboration/conversation, [produce] an effect on achievement two to three times as large as the National Reading Panel found for the effect of systematic phonics instruction.” (This analysis is presented in a chapter by John Guthrie and Nicole Humenick in The Voice of Evidence in Reading Research.)
 
From his own research, Allington points to an exemplary teacher study in which students were allowed “managed choice.” “That is, kids were given a number of texts to select from—texts of a common genre, on a common theme, or historical era, and so on. What does it matter whether students read The Things They Carried or Into Thin Air—both are wonderful modern American lit. Does it matter which Hemingway novel they read? Which 19th century British author they read?Too often it seems that choice is restricted simply to allow for common assessment of core content, not assessment of genre, tradition, or response.”

In addition to choice, Allington names access to texts and “a bit of blessing of the books by the teacher or a peer” as other motivators for student reading.
 
However, a problem he sees is that most schools don’t own the literature or magazines that adolescents most want to read. “The books the teens are interested in aren’t even in the building, much less on a department reading list. So schools might have to make a choice. Do you want [students] to read over the summer? Then open up the recommended list to a much broader array of texts and introduce those texts before the end of the school year.” He also recommends adding more informational texts, a move that he thinks might appeal to boys.

Allington offers two other suggestions for encouraging adolescents to read voluntarily and to stay away from the Cliff Notes versions: “Schools might create opportunities for summer readers to come together to engage in conversations about the books they are reading, maybe even creating dramatic reenactments of scenes and such. Finally, make sure the kids have the books the day they leave for summer vacation. Just providing a list almost ensures few kids will read anything, especially in all but the wealthiest communities.”

Click here to see what some middle schools are doing.

Click here to see what some high schools are doing.

For more information on this topic, visit NCTE’s “Summer Reading and Learning” teaching collection at http://www.ncte.org/collections/summerread.