Column: How summer reading helps students succeed
Former Paso Robles Joint Unified School District Superintendent Curt Dubost.
– Summer break in schools is a remnant of a time long gone for most families when children were needed to assist with the harvest on the family farm. Most schools no longer close from mid-June to the Tuesday after Labor Day, opting instead for longer breaks spread through the school year. Nevertheless, extended summer vacation remains an important time for family vacations, summer jobs for older students, and for kids to attend various remedial, accelerated, and enrichment programs. It is also a chance for students and teachers to take a break from school and recharge before the new school year begins with a new class with a new teacher or teachers and with new, more advanced grade-level curriculum.
However your child or grandchild is spending their summer, it is important for them to read. A lot.
Extensive research corroborates the obvious: kids who don’t read over the summer months tend to regress in their literacy. I’ll also repeat the most important research finding I know: Kids who like school and can read at or above grade level by the end of third grade are almost guaranteed to graduate from high school on time and to learn the curriculum. Unfortunately, those who are behind at that time, when the daily curriculum shifts from “Learning to read, to reading to learn”, often never catch up and may lose interest in school as they are often pulled from enrichment for extra assistance and /or enrolled in remedial classes in place of high-interest electives in middle school and beyond.
If you don’t have a home library of age-appropriate books, most schools provide parents with summer reading lists. I’m certain almost any school will recommend and provide books for kids to take home over the summer. Used book stores and libraries also offer options, as do many book exchanges, such as the community “libraries” at individual homes scattered through many school attendance areas.
Another resource that I’ve recommended over the years and many parents love is the Core Knowledge Curriculum. This was introduced first in the late 1980’s by Dr. E. D. Hirsch from the University of Virginia. Hirsch, who is still alive at 98, argued in “Cultural Literacy” that the preservation of any culture, but particularly a diverse democracy like ours, requires that its citizens have a common background of basic core knowledge of history, literature and other academic disciplines.
I attended several conferences featuring Dr. Hirsch, and implemented elements of his curriculum thirty years ago in Templeton Schools. It may be illustrated by almost all cartoons where one must have some common background of knowledge to “get the joke.” He used the old FarSide cartoons to illustrate his point. One I recall had a baby drawing elaborate pictures on the ceiling above his crib with the caption, “Michelangelo as a child.” Others were Abe Lincoln asking Mary Todd if she was sure she wanted to go to the theater, George Washington carrying an axe after his father told him to go pick some cherries, and Einstein responding “it depends” when asked for the time of day.
He is best known for “Cultural Literacy and the sequential books, including “What Every Kindergartner” through “What Every Eighth Grader “ should know, which were very popular, particularly with homeschool parents. They have been updated and revised over the years and are available very inexpensively online or from the Core Knowledge Foundation.
Whatever you and your children pick to read, I hope you’ll find time daily to turn off all electronic devices and read to or with your student(s) for at least thirty minutes. I, as a youngster, remember reading all the Hardy Boys mysteries and often sneaking them under the covers to finish with a flashlight after bedtime. Almost any Western, sports biography or war history also captured my interest.
Ask them what they’d like to read. Ask them to tell you about the book and whether or not they’d recommend it to friends. Help them with any difficult words.
I hope all families have a joyous summer that includes daily sustained reading time.
– Former Paso Robles Joint Unified School District Superintendent Curt Dubost
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