Like you, I’ve been looking for resources to help my students overcome the “summer slide.” Many of you know the research that says on average, students’ achievement scores can decline as much as one month’s worth of school-year learning. Our low income students seem to experience additional loss, and often, the loss is larger at higher grade levels. Our voracious readers enjoy reading as a year round hobby, but we do have students who fall through the cracks.
Here are several things we can try.
Reading Resource Specialist Joan Moser suggests working with classroom teachers to have students set goals for summer reading. She suggests students write a letter to themselves listing specific books they are looking forward to, setting a goal of number of books or authors they want to read, and even listing specific reading strategies they want to be certain to focus on.
Students needing help setting a summer reading goal could turn to Scholastic which hosts a Summer Reading Challenge: www.scholastic.com/summer. This summer’s theme is “A Magical Summer of Reading,” and students can log their reading minutes online to earn
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Their enthusiasm is contagious, and I’ve overheard many a student sharing their favorite sites. Fanfiction, also known as Fanfic, is almost always free and is inspired by books, films, TV shows, music, and even celebrities. Often, it is created by our very own students who are fans of an original work and who feel inspired to continue the story. Fanfiction can be read online on a wide variety of websites. One of the biggest sites is fanfiction.net but there are loads more like Underlined, Archive your own, and even Goodreads, which has a fanfiction component on its website. Here is a recent post from EBook Friendly (a Pinterest-like site for EBooks) presenting 15 of the most popular fanfiction websites. Fanfiction sites have the added bonus of encouraging students to write as well as read over the