Have you heard about the “Summer Slide”? It sounds like fun but educators know the real deal. It refers to the amount of knowledge a student tends to lose over the summer if he/she is not actively learning. On average, kids lose 30% or more of the skills learned in the last year. The students who are most at risk for learning loss are those with learning challenges such as reading disorders and ADHD. Our expert tutors can prevent the Summer Slide! Learn more about it here…
Students who fall into any of these at-risk categories are particularly disinclined to engage in independent reading activities during the summer. Students with learning disabilities spend 10 months struggling with the daily challenges of learning and tackling tasks that leave them exhausted and defeated.
The summer months offer these students time to focus on activities that highlight their abilities and rebuild their confidence. However, this population is especially at-risk for summer learning loss. The learning that occurs during the school year requires explicit instruction, guided practice, and multiple opportunities to apply learned skills.
Many of their targeted skills are left in a critical state of emergence on the last day of school. Words may still be transient and not permanently anchored into their automatic reading system. If the learning process for reading is interrupted, it may put the student in a position to need to begin the learning all over again. If nothing else, careful attention should be given to maintaining these vulnerable skills and avoiding any signs of learning loss during the summer.
What Can We Do to Prevent Summer Learning Loss?
It is not enough to just say “read over the summer” to at-risk students in the face of summer reading loss. In addition, students do not need access to just any materials over the summer to promote learning, they need access to the right materials. The obvious recommendation to prevent the summer slide for at-risk students is participation in a high-quality summer literacy program.
Tips for Addressing The Summer Slide:
- Access to books is critical. The public library is an excellent free resource for families to have access to books of a wide range of interests and reading levels, as well as librarians to guide children and families in selecting great books.
- When children select reading materials themselves and read for enjoyment, they receive the most gains in reading achievement, including better reading comprehension, writing style, vocabulary, spelling, and grammatical development. Also, the longer that this free voluntary reading is practiced, the more consistent and positive the results. Thus summer programs that allow and encourage children to choose what they read are likely to be most successful.
- Children and teens tend to read more when adults in their lives encourage them to read, and also when they see those adults reading often themselves.
- Children that feel that reading is fun tend to read more often, so summer programs that help make reading enjoyable and social are most successful.
- Reading just 4 to 6 books over the summer has the potential to prevent a decline in reading achievement scores from the spring to the fall, so even small steps are extremely beneficial.
- Preventing summer slide is most effective when everyone —including schools, public libraries, community centers, parent groups, social service agencies, and especially tutoring services —work together to encourage kids to read, make reading fun, and to reach families about the importance of reading over the summer.
- Summer tutoring should be individualized so that the focus is placed on the student’s main areas of challenge while working with the student’s strengths. For that reason, one-on-one tutoring is more effective than group work with students of diverse needs.
Our tutors can create a targeted action plan for summer sessions in order to support the skills that the students gained during the year while also working on skills required for the upcoming year. Tutors will work with the students’ required summer reading and math packets provided by the school in addition to other outside resources that cater to the students’ interests, activities, and passions. Students will enter the upcoming year feeling prepared and confident to take on new challenges!
Contact us today to get more information about our summer tutoring and make a plan for your child’s success.