Summer Reading Made Easy
Teachers at TDS are deeply committed to practices that reduce summer academic loss as they are well aware that it can take up to two months to re-teach material that students have forgotten during the summer break. In an attempt to maintain and improve reading skills, teachers recruited student involvement and applied data-based decision making to individualize summer reading lists. Immediately after students completed the Northwest Evaluation Association Measures of Academic Progress (NWEA MAP), teachers made ready use of lexile scores to identify summer reading selections appropriate for each student’s instructional level. Lexile scores represent a child’s reading ability, which can then be matched with lexile leveled tests. This process takes into account the fact that a student’s reading level may fall below or above grade level and therefore provides an excellent starting point for selecting material students can read independently.
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To increase motivation to engage in summer reading, teachers interviewed each student to determine individual interests and then entered this information along with lexile scores obtained on the NWEA MAP test into the book search option of the www.lexile.com website. Resulting book options were then reviewed and summer lists compiled within a matter of minutes. Teachers also created a variety of grade-level book presentation options (e.g., traditional book report, power point presentation, book in a bag, and diorama) to allow students to select a book report format matched to his/her learning style. Although the process of determining lexile scores and leveling text books is not a perfect science, the combined incorporation of an estimated reading level and student interest results in a more tailored approach for each child than simply assigning a generic grade-level summer reading list.
For more on how to make summer reading effective, please visit the following research briefs:- James Kim, Assistant Professor of Education at Harvard University
- Harris Cooper, Professor at Duke University
