How to Prevent the Summer Slide in Reading {7 Ideas}

How do we prevent the summer slide in reading? You’ve worked so hard all year long to help your students build a strong foundation in reading and phonics. Studies have shown students can lose critical reading skills over the summer. With summer quickly approaching, now is the time to start thinking about how your students will maintain their reading skills over the summer.

Putting resources in the hands of parents is an important part of preventing summer learning loss. These activities and ideas are perfect to share with the parents in your classroom or to do with your own kids at home.

Provide parents some literacy-based websites and some screen-free literacy activities to do.

Sharing our favorite literacy-based websites and screen-free activities at home is an easy way to put practical resources into parents’ hands. Then, they can be equipped to help prevent the summer slide.

I shared some of my favorite websites that encourage online learning on my blog HERE. Be sure to grab the free download to share with parents. It will help them keep up with login information for each of the sites I recommended.

You can also give parents some screen-free activities to do at home with things they might already have. I shared six screen-free activities to do at home that will help encourage reading and writing at home to prevent the summer slide in reading on my blog HERE.

Send home decodable passages for students to practice with.

If you have parents asking for help with reading with their children over the summer, my Decodable Passages would be a great resource to provide them. There are passages for Blends, Digraphs, and CVCe Words.

Each set of decodable passages has:

• 3 decodable passages for each specific skill
• word list to practice
• comprehension questions
• dictation sentences

You can send home a set that aligns with each student’s reading abilities at the end of the year and a set that’s a level up. Grab the Blends Passages, Digraphs Passages, and CVCe Word Passages to make summer reading instruction a breeze for parents.

Encourage students to complete summer reading challenges.

One of my favorite ways to encourage students to read over the summer is with summer reading challenges. These are fun ways to prevent the summer slide in riding by encouraging reading every day. You can grab my FREE printable Summer Reading Challenge HERE. Print it out for students or email it to their parents.

Book stores like Barnes and Noble and Half Priced Books also offer summer reading challenges. When the challenges are completed, students can turn them in for a free book.

Give students a Summer Bucket List of activities.

A few years ago, my team and I created these fun Summer Buckets full simple items that students can use to complete a checklist of activities. We wanted students to stay engaged in educational games and have fun while practicing. You can grab the FREE bucket list printable on my blog post HERE as well as the sight word lists.

Summer Buckets would be perfect to give to students if you are having an end-of-the-year drive-through at your campus to give students any items still in the classroom.

Send home easy-to-use shared reading passages.

Shared reading is often a class favorite! Keep it going over the summer by sending home the Shared Reading Print-and-Go with ten poems. Each poem has five days of activities to go with the poem. The poems are student-friendly and perfect for kindergarten and first grade learners. Your students can do the weekly activities with their parents or an older sibling.

Share some hands-on alphabet activities for families to do together.

If you’ve got preschool or kindergarten students, they could definitely practice some alphabet skills over the summer to maintain a strong reading foundation. Share some hands-on activities students can do with their families to have fun, stay active, and practice alphabet skills. You can find my favorite summer alphabet activities HERE.

Have students use Boom cards to practice over the summer.

If you have already started using Boom cards with your students, you can continue to assign them to them over the summer. See what skills your students might need extra practice with over the summer and have them work on those tasks.

You can find my step-by-step tutorial to get started on Boom cards HERE.

You can check out my Boom card resources HERE.

pin it

No matter what you call it – the summer slide, summer setback, summer learning loss – it all means the same thing. We want to try to curb it as much as possible. So often parents want to help, but they aren’t sure how. Let’s empower them to prevent the summer slide in reading with these simple and easy-to-use resources!