Help teens, kids avoid the summer reading slide

If teens and younger kids don’t read during the summer, their reading level can decline two, three or even four months. Educators have a name for it: the summer slide.

Tim Shanahan, director of the Center for Literacy at the University of Chicago, said parents with a ready supply of great reads are a great cure for the summer slide. In order to maintain their reading level, Shanahan said, kids should read at least five books during the break - or about one book every two weeks.

Here are Shanahan’s simple suggestions to stop the summer slide in its tracks:

1. Help your kids find books on subjects that interest them. Have a child who loves baseball? Help him find books on American’s greatest pastime.

2. Make reading a social event. “A lot of kids find reading lonely,” Shanahan said. So read with your child or to your child, regardless of her age.

3. Draw connections to the book your kids are reading. If one of them is reading a book that takes place in a forest, plan a day trip to the woods near your home.

You can even take this to an extreme and plan a family vacation around a favorite book. Shanahan said when his daughters were young, they fell in love with Margaret Henry’s classic “Misty of Chincoteague,” a story about a wild pony that lived on an island off the coast of Virginia and Maryland. So one summer the family planned a vacation to Assateague Island to see firsthand the feral ponies that Henry made famous in her books.

4. Let your kids pick what they want to read. If your teen picks out a graphic novel but you’d rather have him read a classic, let him read the graphic novel. “Teens want to create distance, let them do that,” Shanahan said.

If the book your child is reading turns out to be a dud, let him abandon it and move on to another book. (Many high school assign specific books for summer reading. The information may be included on the school Web site.)

5. Search the Internet for book suggestions. For teen readers, Shanahan recommends looking at the Young Adults’ Choices Booklist from International Reading Association.

6. Create a special time and place for your kids to read. Maybe it’s 30 minutes right after lunch or a sunny spot on the living room couch. Even during the most unstructured season of the year, some habits are good to have.

To learn more: Tim Shanahan writes about reading on his Web site ShanahanOnLiteracy.com.