SEATTLE — Students are trading their backpacks for beach bags – but that doesn’t mean their learning has to come to a halt.
According to the American Educational Research Journal, the average student loses between 17 and 34% of the prior year’s learning gains during summer break.
KIRO 7 News spoke with Half Price Books President Kathy Thomas, who says that a good book or two can help beat that ‘summer slide.’
“It’s a muscle, and we have to keep that muscle going to make sure it stays active and that kids are progressing.”
Thomas says accessibility and encouragement are key. She suggests leaving books in areas where your children spend most of their time; it can entice them to pick one up.
A mother of three, she can relate to the struggle.
“If I had said, ‘go up to your bedroom, get a book off your shelf and then let’s read,’ they’d go upstairs,” she says, “and I’d never see them again.”
She says another way to promote reading is by making a trip to the bookstore a reward.
“Instead of, ‘oh let’s go get an ice cream it’s let’s go get an ice cream and go to the bookstore.’”
Half Price Books is sweetening that deal with their Summer Reading Camp. Stop by any of the Seattle-area locations and pick up an interactive reading log. At the end of the summer, children can turn it in for $5 in Bookworm Bucks to spend in the store.
“You get to go back to the bookstore and discover a new character, a new author, a new subject matter,” she says.
Thomas suggests finding books about topics your children are interested in. Not everyone is a bookworm, but understanding their passions will encourage them to crack open the cover.
“My dyslexic son hated to read because he was not a strong reader,” Thomas tells KIRO 7 News. “So we would read baseball books because it’s summertime and he’s really into baseball and football.”
She says it made the experience more enjoyable for them both.
“I think that kind of helped him to think, ‘okay, if this sports hero wrote a book or is talked about in the books, then they must be pretty good to read.”
Thomas says reading doesn’t mean committing to an entire chapter book. When her children were young, she says they spent a lot of time reading in the kitchen.
“We’d be cooking, and I’d pull out a cookbook if I was trying a new recipe and I would ask them, ‘okay, how many cups of sugar do we have?’ so they learn certain math skills, and it was interactive, and they got to do it with mom.”
She says the goal is to focus on minutes read – not books finished.
“Different children read at different levels,” she says, “so we encourage reading every day for it to become a habit.”
For more information about Half Price Books’ Summer Reading camp, click here.
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