Keeping your child’s mind active throughout the hot summer months requires a bit of imagination and encouragement. The easiest way to keep your child engaged throughout the summer is to make sure that they are reading – a lot.
Reading is one of the most apparent indicators of a child’s academic, intellectual, social, and emotional strength. Here are GAMECHANGER’s 5 reasons that children should spend time reading this summer.
- Reading helps build basic developmental skills. When someone reads to a little child, the child learns several vital skills that will help with basic developmental skills. First and foremost, the child learns to listen. The ability to pay attention to what someone else is saying and process that information is an important learning skill for children. Learning to understand other perspectives and listen to what others have to say is a basic milestone in early childhood. As a child gets older, listening to stories enables him to infer deeper meanings of a character’s actions. When a child talks about a story he’s heard or read, he is building a common base with others. Even the act of listening to a story can be used as a teaching moment, showing a child how to actively engage as a listener.
- Reading teaches children to communicate. Books teach children how to communicate. Literature exists because people need to tell their stories, whether it be about the dinner they just ate, their bus ride to school, or the bird they saw sitting on top of the mailbox. As your child develops, you want him to communicate with you. To tell you what he needs and why he needs it. To explain how he feels. To describe situations to you. Reading stories, providing a child with a variety of perspectives on different topics, helps your child to become a better communicator.
- Reading helps children build vocabulary. An avid reader typically has a strong vocabulary. A child who is exposed to words regularly has a greater grasp of language. That child will be exposed to words in stories and be able to transfer new vocabulary to everyday conversation. Once again, improving that child’s ability to communicate.
- Reading over the summer helps children avoid the “summer slide.” The “summer slide” is the tendency for children to lose information that they learned at school during the summertime. There is compelling evidence that learning loss during the summer is a real thing. In the summer, children can lose weeks, or even months, of concepts and curriculum that they learned at school. For elementary school children, the biggest slide is the loss of reading ability, followed by math skills. Many elementary school children lose up to 20 percent of their school year reading gains over the summer. Middle school and high school aged children also lose valuable reading reading skills over the summer if they do not spend time reading over the summer. And, spending 30 minutes a day reading throughout the summer can lead to notable academic gains when children return to school in the fall.
- Reading helps children build confidence. By expanding children’s knowledge and giving them a broader perspective on the world, reading helps students become more confident. Children who read for at least 30 minutes a day tend to have higher self-esteem than children who do not commit to reading. Reading helps children improve their comprehension skills and sharpen critical thinking skills, all of which makes children more capable of problem solving and comfortably speaking in public. These are all characteristics of a confident child. Children who read are exposed to new worlds and new ideas. Traveling through stories to new places exposes children to experiences that they wouldn’t necessarily encounter in their own lives. This makes children more empathetic, and empathetic people tend to be more confident as well.
From helping with decoding to comprehending, GAMECHANGER Tutoring Connection is here to help children of all ages to become proficient readers. Working with a GAMECHANGER Tutoring Connection reading tutor over the summer will help children avoid the inevitable summer slide, build confidence, foster developmental and communication skills, and help children build vocabulary. For more information and support, reach out to GAMECHANGER Tutoring Connection.
