Summer Reading Activities for Your Children

Parents: While it’s wonderful for children to have the opportunity to laze around in the summer, play with friends and simply have fun; there is also a strong argument for spending some time on academics. Without some reading time, your children’s literacy skills are likely to decline. You can’t let this happen as being able to read well is a cornerstone to success in school. Plus, the more children read, the better they will read. Fortunately, there is so much you can do in a casual way to improve your children’s reading skills during the summer. We hope that some of the following reading activities will be fun for your family as well as skill builders for your children:

The Family Reading Half-Hour

• Choose the same half-hour time slot each day for your family’s summer reading time. Immediately after supper works well for many families. During reading time, everyone in the family, including parents,  will sit in the same room and read with no television, electronic devices or phone calls allowed. Obviously, some accommodations will need to be made for families with very young children. Stories can be read to them, they can look at books, and the reading time can be shortened.
• Just seeing their parents read will inspire your children to read. Dr. Ena Shelley of the College of Education at Butler University suggests choosing well-written, attractive, interesting books that will allow the children to experience the joys of being lost in a book. After reading time is up, family members can continue reading or resume their usual activities. What is being read doesn’t need to be discussed unless family members wish to do so.

Starting a Reading Club
Increasing your children’s reading skills works best in the summer if appealing activities are chosen. One possibility is starting a parent-child book club. Belonging to a book club offers children these benefits:

• Getting other children’s and parents’ perspectives on a book
• Discussing difficult issues brought up in a book in a comfortable environment
• Receiving practice in analyzing books (helpful for future book reports)
• Increasing language skills through discussions of books
• Enhancing closeness to a parent

Book clubs work best when the children are about the same age and have similar reading skills. In the early elementary years, poor readers can have their parents read the books to them. Older readers with weak skills can participate in same-age clubs by listening to books on tape. Book clubs should not have too many participants, as this limits individual participation.
It’s easiest to begin a book club by talking with one or more parents of young children who might be interested. Older children can do much of the work of starting a book club. Once possible participants have been chosen, an organizational meeting needs to be held to discuss the place, time and format of the meetings and possible books.
The important part of each meeting is the discussion by parents and children. Limit the time to what is appropriate to the age of the children. And don’t forget to include refreshments at the start or conclusion of the meeting.

Building Vocabulary Activities
The more words your children know, the easier it will be for them to understand what they read. Vocabulary building should begin at a very early age. What works best is to talk to young children about what they are seeing and doing and reading stories to them. This approach continues to work well as children grow up. Be sure to talk to your older children about a variety of topics. And no matter how old your children are, take them places such as fish hatcheries, car museums, county fairs and state capitols where they will learn new words to describe what they are seeing.

Play word games with your school-age children, as it helps them develop and maintain an interest in words. There are formal word games like Boggle and Scrabble. It’s also enjoyable for a family to make puns with words and to try making palindromes – words that read the same backward or forward. Be sure also to introduce your children to crossword puzzles.
Learning new words should be fun for children of all ages. Besides playing word games, you can introduce a new word every evening at the dinner table or on a short trip in the car, and then have members of the family try to think of synonyms and antonyms for them. Younger children should be encouraged to build compound words by joining two familiar words. Older children can enjoy building new words from root words, prefixes and suffixes. While traveling as a family, play a game that gives prizes for the most unusual word found on billboards. Plus, it’s always fun to try to figure out what the letters in personal license plates stand for.

Online Reading Activities
Some children can be lured into reading more because they are playing an online reading game. Use a search engine with your children to find appropriate Web sites. Elementary School children may like “Game Station” on www.rif.org/kids/readingplanet.htm.