Summer Reading Guide for Parents to Preventing the Summer Slide

Do you have parents who want quality resources to work with their children at home to prevent the summer slide? Do you have readers in your class who you want to keep moving forward throughout the summer? Then the Summer Reading Kits might be perfect for you and the parents in your classroom.

Over the summer, students often fall behind quite a bit from lack of reading. We all know the saying, “If you don’t use it, you lose it!” We all know how much progress students make in reading kindergarten, first, and second grade. It takes hard work from our young readers (and ourselves!). Instead of falling behind, let’s set students up for moving forward in reading over the summer!

The completed Summer Reading Kits are set up in levels. They begin with first graders in mind and start with Level One. Let’s jump into what these kits are all about and how they can empower parents to prevent the summer slide with summer reading.

How to Use the Summer Reading Kits

I designed these kits to be used at home by parents to help prevent the summer slide in reading. I included a guide in the kit that shows parents what they need for each “lesson”. The kits for each level have all of the components needed to implement an at-home friendly version of focused phonics reading.

Here are a few other ways you can use these leveled kits:

• As supplemental reading small group texts and resources
• During intervention time
• Summer school reading program
• Have the books and lesson materials in a basket for volunteers or paraprofessionals to use with your students for extra practice

Parent Tips and Guide to Prevent the Summer Slide

Two important things I wanted for these resources was for them to be easy for parents to do at home and to be easily organized. To help parents get started, I created a Parent’s Guide. This lays out everything they need to know about the whole kit.

I also included a reading strategy table so they can quickly see what strategy each book is focused on, the comprehension focus, sight words for each book, and word work for each book. With a brief and easy-to-read guide, parents can confidently continue to teach summer reading to their kids at home.

Plus, I shared a simple way to organize it all. Parents can go from feeling overwhelmed to feeling organized with a plan.

Easy Summer Reading Lesson

Even though many parents want to prevent the summer slide in reading, they may not be fully equipped. To help parents easily teach their own children, I included an easy-to-follow two-day lesson plan for each book. It has exactly what to say and do before reading, during, and after reading. Parents can have no teaching experience and be successful!

Familiar Quality Teaching Resources

If you’ve purchased any of my Reading Small Grouup Kids, your students will be happy to see familiar teaching posters, sight word cards, and vocabulary cards. I made at-home friendly teaching posters that correspond with the guided reading posters for consistency.

While the Summer Reading Kits are different than the Reading Small Group Kits, students will see familiar teaching elements to help remind them of previous learning.

High-Quality Texts for Each Level

There are four texts for each level. Each level has two fiction books and two nonfiction books. Each kit has the books in:

• full color
• black and white
• passage format

Helpful Student Materials

Another important component of the Summer Reading Kits are the student materials. I wanted parents to have everything they’d need to do the entire lesson start to finish. You can send home the printed materials or parents can print these out and be totally set to read with their children. Each book has its own:

• sight word cards
• word work components
• phonics worksheet

There are also fluency strips included for each level to help kids practice fluency.

Ready to try out the Summer Reading Kits? Here’s where you can find them.