A few thoughts on summer reading:

• Summer reading should be fun!  We would like to inspire a joy of reading among our students, so have included engaging, entertaining, even silly reads.

• Picture books bring tremendous benefits to children who are in the early stages of developing their reading skills. Illustrations shown alongside text offer invaluable tools to help kids build understanding, fluency, vocabulary and other foundational literacy skills. The imagery in a picture book brings the pages to life, serving as a visual roadmap for the story. Enjoy these magical stories, and please don’t feel that your children need to rush to early readers and chapter books!

• Emerging readers love series, so we have included a huge number of possibilities across many genres. When students read a series, they deepen their connection with the books’ characters, increase comprehension, increase reading time, and have a good idea of what they’d like to read next.

• We recommend that our students read a minimum of 20 minutes per day, either alone or with an adult.  Ideally their amount of reading time should match or exceed their daily minutes of “screen time”.

• We encourage you to visit local libraries and independent bookstores – our favorite is Politics and Prose in Northwest DC, which has a wonderful children’s section.

• We have linked all our titles to a list on Bookshop.org, which supports Independent bookstores.

• If you buy your books on Amazon, please consider using the HTS Smile program (link is on the main page of the website).

We love this piece written by Julie M. Wood, Ed.D. that appeared on the PBS Parents Website:

As parents, one of our major roles is to make sure that children set aside time every day to read – to read for pleasure, for information, for the vicarious thrill of living in an imaginary world. Why is this so important?

• Children need to engage with books every day so they can maintain, and ideally strengthen, all the literacy skills they learned during the previous school year. Assistant Principal Twana Santana-Embry compares reading to exercising, telling her students that any time they read they are “strengthening their reading muscles.”

• The stakes for children who do not read over summer vacation are high. Substantial research on this topic shows it’s usually the students who can least afford to lose ground as readers who are most likely to suffer from summer reading loss and fall far behind their peers.

• The few months of loss in reading skills compounds over the years; by the time children reach middle school, those who haven’t read during the summers may have lost as much as two years worth of achievement.

The good news is that if children read just six books over summer vacation, they will likely avoid summer reading loss. Here are a few ideas for reaching–and going beyond–this six book goal:

• Take books with you and your child everywhere you go; to the doctor’s office, on picnics, on road trips, etc.

• Let your child choose the books s/he wants to read (as long as they’re age-appropriate and are written at the just right level of difficulty).

• Support his reading experience by talking about the books and helping him understand and interpret what s/he reads.

• Read aloud to your child, even if s/he can read on his own. It helps build vocabulary and listening comprehension skills.

• As you’re reading aloud, be sure to interact with your child by asking what s/he thinks might happen next, what a certain character is likely to do, whether the story is real or make-believe, and so forth. Above all, have fun!

• If you are more comfortable reading to your child in a language other than English, by all means do so. What your child learns in his or her native language will help create a bridge to learning English.

We truly believe that encouraging your child to continue flexing his or her reading muscles over summer vacation is the single most important thing you can do to help develop literacy learning.

We hope you enjoy exploring these lists with your child to identify wonderful summer reading options.

Happy Reading!