Several parents have asked me, "How important is it for my child to read this summer? After all, they'll be back in school before you know it.  It’s been a hard year, summer’s short, couldn’t they just take the summer off this year?” ​

Yes, it is vital for your child to read over the summer.  Children should never just take the summer off from reading.  Everyone should read. Most parents sit and read to children when the child is too young to read, but do you still sit and read with your child when they are older?  Do you listen to your child read, or do you just send them off to read alone?  Reading should be a family activity every single day. 
 
Stop and ask yourself:  What do my children see me doing?  Do my children see me watching TV or reading a book? Do my children see me on my phone or reading a book?  Children mimic and learn from your actions.
 
Why Is It Important For Children to Read over the Summer?
 
Research from over 7,500 school districts and 18 million students has shown that 52% of students lose an average of 39% of their total school year gains during the summer months.  That’s half of the students across the United States, and they're losing about 1/3 of what they learned during the school year.  The research goes on to explain that students who do not read over the summer will only retain approximately 70% of what they learned in the classroom during the normal school year. So yes, reading over the summer is extremely important and vital to every single child's education, especially this year after the erratic educational year children have experienced.
 
What Should My Child Read?
 
Let your children choose reading material, but do not be afraid to challenge them to try something new. One of the best ways to encourage your child to read something new and different is for the two of you to sit down and read it together. Make summer reading a time to explore new and different ideas, or even to read about different places in the world. If you get tired of being in the house, read outside.  Make reading a fun time, and remember, the library is free. 
 
The first step is to keep the brain engaged and active. Watching TV does not keep the brain engaged or active. Sorry.  Yes, your brain is thinking while you're watching TV, but it is not focusing on learning or understanding new words.  Expanding one's vocabulary is essential to learning.  Yes, the brain is also working while you're playing video games, but the brain is not learning new vocabulary words while you're playing video games.  
 
Emphasize vocabulary building during summer reading.  Sit and read together, challenging children to read something new, maybe something a bit harder than what they usually read.  Don't just assume your child is reading just because you hand the child the book. Instead, sit down and read with your child.  Vocabulary is what enables us to comprehend. If a child does not understand the meaning of the words that they are reading, they cannot understand what the book is saying.  We learn new words through reading. 
 
Do not simply point to a word and tell the child the word.  Break the word down and learn the word.  At my reading clinic, we call it the 4-steps: 

• (Step 1) always say the letter sounds and spell the word,
• (Step 2) give a definition,
• (Step 3) use the word in a sentence, and
• (Step 4) write the word correctly.

Read More: Four Steps to Learn a New Word

Read More: Hands-On Learning


As we read, we completely engage the brain in learning new words and what they mean. As we read, we learn how the words apply to what we’re reading. Then, and only, then are we actually comprehending.

Make reading fun.  Discover something new or explore a special interest. Use hands-on learning techniques. 

This becomes a teaching tool. We can read about each tree and then make the tree. At my reading clinic, I provide patterns and step-by-step directions to help the children make trees.  Reading and following step-by-step directions helps children improve reading comprehension skills. 

There are seven different trees in the model displayed at the top of the page.​​

You can also emphasize animals.  You can find free clip art pictures of animals from the Amazon rainforest, have the child color each animal, add them to your rainforest, and then read and learn about each animal. You don't need to go out and buy special materials.  The rainforest model was made out of construction paper and recyclable materials lying around the house. The only thing that I bought was green yarn.  ​

​Read with your child each and every day.  No matter how busy you are, you have time to sit down and read a book with your child.  Make it a part of your daily schedule.  Have a set time the two of you can sit down and read together.  Be consistent and read at the same time every day (even on vacation).  Reading together is just as important as brushing your teeth.  Research shows that summer reading is the best way to avoid the “summer slide" (losing gains over the summer).

• How many books have you and your child read together this summer? 
• ​Why not start today?  The local library is free. 

Parents have been asking lately:  Do you think it is possible for my child to make up everything they lost during the coronavirus pandemic?  My answer is a definite yes, if we use the correct teaching methods.  Let me give an example to explain.
 
A 15-year-old high school freshman was brought to my reading clinic one year. She tested at the pre-kindergarten level in reading.  She knew the consonant sounds, but none of the vowel sounds.  She could not even read or recognize words with the short a vowel sound, such as cat or can.  Nor could she read the word the.  It took me 3½ years, but I taught her to read using vowel clustering.  Her school used balanced literacy and one-on-one phonics tutoring.  She had failed for nine straight years with systematic phonics tutoring.  As I’ve said many times, phonics simply does not work for all students.  The school said she would never be able to learn to read.  Yet, she did learn, and she was very excited to be able to read. 
 
If changing teaching methods can make up for 9 years of learning loss or failure, then yes, we can help each and every student who is struggling after the coronavirus pandemic.  We can help students learn to read, but to do so, we must change the way we teach struggling students.
 
How Should We Start? 
Many well-intentioned educators are saying that we should “stick with grade level curriculum.”  They are saying, regardless how far behind or confused your students are, teach what is assigned for that grade level.  I say, wrong.  Such a policy will only cause more failure.  Look at the example of our 15-year-old.  If I had said that she is 15 years old and she is a freshman in high school; therefore, I must teach her freshman high school reading material, she would never have learned to read.  She had failed for nine straight years; her failure was deeply ingrained. She did not believe she would ever learn to read.  No, we must start where the confusion or failure begins.  If the student is 15 years old and cannot read at the pre-kindergarten level—does not know even simple vowel sounds—then, obviously, I have to teach that student at the pre-kindergarten level, no matter her age or grade in school.
 
The same is true with students returning to the classroom after the coronavirus pandemic. We cannot teach them at the level they should be at in school; instead, we must teach them at the skill level they possess when they return to the classroom.  If there are fourth-graders reading at the first grade level, then we must begin to rebuild by teaching them at the first grade level. Using this method, I really have had students move up four grade levels in reading in one school year.  When it comes to reading, you cannot skip around. The student must learn one step at a time.  This is how we teach with vowel clustering.
 
Why Did Phonics Not Work?
As Dr. Mark Seidenberg states in his book, Language at the Speed of Sight:  How We Read, Why so Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done About It, the reason phonics did not work for my 15-year-old student and for many students is that it does not connect with oral speech.  Vowel clustering works directly with the oral language system.  This is why we have been so successful.
 
Earlier Post: Reading Wars and How Should We Teach Children to Read? 

Earlier Post: Reading Wars Are Over! Who Won? Certainly Not the Students

As Dr. Seidenberg goes on to explain, real scientific research has had little effect on how reading is being taught in the classroom.  If we simply return students to the classroom and do not change how we teach reading, reading failure will continue.  At present, the Nation’s Report Card shows that 65% of fourth graders tested below grade level when they took the test in 2019. These test scores were before the coronavirus pandemic.
  
Yes, we have a problem in reading education, and that problem is only going to get worse.  The only way we can get rid of reading failure is to change how we teach children to read.  Phonics simply does not work for struggling students.  As Dr. Jeffrey S. Bowers explains “the strength of evidence for phonics has been exaggerated…. the evidence for phonics is weak.” 
 
So, if phonics does not work for struggling at-risk students, what should we do?  I have been successful using vowel clustering with failing and struggling students. Eight years of research document my success.
 
Will All of The Education Problems Be Solved Just by Sending Children Back into the Classroom? 
No, we also need to be careful about how we reopen schools.  Chad Aldeman, a policy director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, encourages us to look back at history.  He states that past disasters, especially the 1918 pandemic, should teach us the path that we should follow. 

“Without a plan for recovery focused on students’ needs, we’ll be condemning a generation of children to worse academic and economic outcomes throughout their life. Looking back in time, the children born during the 1918 flu pandemic had lower educational attainment, increased rates of physical disability, lower income and a greater reliance on government welfare. With hindsight, we have an opportunity to learn from the evidence of past disasters and take action now to make sure the same results don’t happen again.”