If your child doesn’t like to read, has to be cajoled to pick up a book and the home reading was a fight throughout the school year then a two month break from it all might be just the break both kid and parents need.
But before you take that break, you should know about the Summer Reading Slide.
Children who do not read over the summer will lose more than two months of reading achievement.
Here’s our current situation, you may recognize it.
For the second half of grade 2 we were asked to track our kid’s reading minutes to add to a monthly tally for the class. We tracked them in his agenda and the monthly goals were all met and surpassed. Yeah!
I padded Jack’s minutes. I am pretty sure I wasn't the only mom doing it. Some days we forgot, some nights he read long and late and on others all he could manage was the back of a cereal box. I counted that. I also factored in how many minutes he likely spent reading instructions on various apps and video games, street signs and menus.
That I didn’t sit and time him every night shouldn't take away from the class goal. At least that’s how I justified my lies.
Jack likes to read - when he finally sits down to do it. It’s just not something he plans, looks forward to or initiates. But, once he’s into a story he wants to stay up late to finish it. (much the same approach I have to sex)
At the beginning of the year he, and most of the kids of the kids in his class, were in the early stages of those level readers. He came home with short easy books and we read them together, then he read a bit and we read more, then he read more and we read less until he as reading them on his own. Then he started bringing home Nate and Bone books and loving them so I thought, great, he’s like his sister now, he’s a reader. Good.
He’s been reading a bunch of the big kid books for a couple of months now and we had applauded his efforts, told him we were proud. I made a conscious effort to leave him be, let him be a reader without interference. But one night I sat beside him on the couch and asked: “So, what’s this one about ?” and he couldn’t really tell me. I suggested we look at it together and as he read aloud I realized that while he could sound words he had never seen before he wasn't making sense of them.
As my friend and literacy guru Lani Donaldson always advises parents: Reading and comprehension are not mutually exclusive. If you don’t understand what you’ve read, then you were not reading.
So we backed things up and now when he gets to a word he doesn't know he has to ask us about it. Makes perfect sense, of course, we should have been doing it all along, but when a reluctant reader is sitting with his nose pressed in a book we are reluctant to meddle.
Until I asked about his book I assumed he was a capable and happy reader and wouldn’t have worried for a moment had he not found time to pick up a book all summer. Little did I know how much that would have set him back.
The reading will stay in the schedule.
(Not sure about the sex though)
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