“Summer slide” may give you visions of flumes in water parks or slides at playgrounds, but it has a serious meaning, too. This is the term used to describe the loss of learning during the summer when children don’t read.
We’re serious about doing our part to help prevent summer slide. We started a Summer Reading Program this year, and we hope you’ll encourage your children to participate.
Doing so is easy: have them visit our bookshelf at their next appointment so they can choose a book to read. If your child loves the book, keep it. Otherwise, bring it back and select another.
We’re so interested in helping your children maintain their reading skills through the summer, we’re willing to reward them for their efforts. We will award three tokens for every book read. Our patients can collect tokens all summer long and cash them in for fun gifts, such as movie passes, dippin’ dots and other great items.
“Our hope is that by the end of the summer, we will have awarded lots of tokens and our bookshelf will be empty because all of our patients found books that they enjoyed so much, they wanted to keep,” says Buffalo Grove orthodontist Dr. Yan Razdolsky.
Why is reading through the summer so important? Here are some interesting facts from the National Summer Learning Association and Scholastic:
- All students experience learning losses when they don’t take part in educational activities during the summer. Research shows students tend to score lower on standardized tests at the end of summer vacation than they do on the same tests at the beginning of the summer.
- Low-income students lose more than two months in reading achievement while school is out for the summer.
- More than half of the achievement gap between low income and high income youth can be explained by unequal access to summer learning opportunities.
- The more children read, the better their fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.
The best predictor of whether children experience summer slide or summer gain is whether they read during the summer, according to the Scholastic website, “and the best predictor of whether a child reads is whether or not he or she owns books.”
We look forward to seeing your children in our office this summer, and encouraging them to grab a book to keep for their own personal library.
Author Garrison Keillor once said: “A book is a gift you can open again and again.” We’re excited to get many, many of these gifts into kids’ hands this summer!
