‘Summer Slide’ is a term used to describe the drop in reading age that occurs over the summer holidays. It sounds scary but it actually follows a common pattern: the more you practice the piano, the better you get; the more you immerse yourself in another language, the more fluent you become. It’s the same with reading – if children stop practising, they become less fluent and so have to restart learning when they return to school each September.
The reason reading is particularly important, is that it’s used for every subject. The more confident you are at reading different kinds of texts, the more open you are to other information. At a beginner’s level, this is very much about practising the mechanics of reading – segmenting words and blending them together, for example. At a more advanced level, it can involve making inferences and exploring new worlds.
To support this, we’re running a Summer Slide Reading Challenge over the summer holiday. The course will involve reading six short books – one for each week to ensure that children’s literacy levels remain where they need to be by September.
Due to the lack of schooling during the pandemic, many children will have experienced a more significant decline than usual. It’s not too late to address this and it may simply be a case of easing children back into reading in a fun and accessible way. The course will be delivered by specialist tutors who will ensure that the content is covered in a fun and creative manner.
We will recommend the texts for the first five weeks (all short reads for different ages and abilities) and then the children will choose their own text for the last week. Each book is supported by an online session which will be pitched at the appropriate skill level – from basic comprehension through to character analysis for older students.
To find out more about the course, please contact joanna@choicehometutoring.co.uk 07899891356
