7 Engaging Ways to Boost Reading Comprehension Over the Summer

The summer slide — that unfortunate decline in students’ reading skills over the summer months — breaks every ELA teacher’s heart. And, two straight months without opening a book impacts student engagement come August and September.

There are ways to prevent this loss. Meaningful literacy activities can prevent the summer slide. They engage students, boost their reading comprehension, and create happy memories around reading. Let’s explore seven effective ways to keep our students reading and learning throughout the summer.

1. Book Clubs with a Twist

Encourage students to form book clubs with friends or family members. These can be virtual meetings or in-person, depending on schedules and preferences.

Share this idea with parents before the end of the school year (since younger learners will need their parent’s involvement). Tell students and parents they can host a book club by the pool, in the library, or in a designated house.

First, students will need to agree on an in-common text. It’s best to provide them with a list of genres. Then, they’ll read the book independently. For younger students, the host parent (or another volunteer) may do a read-aloud at the start of the “meeting.” Older learners can read before they meet (but they’re not too old for a read-aloud, we promise!).

After reading time, engage students in discussions about the story, characters, and themes. You don’t have to come up with these discussion topics on your own! Simple online searches for age-appropriate book club discussion topics will turn up plenty of results.

To make it even more exciting, consider hosting the book club at a playful location connected to the text. Or, dial it back by including book-inspired foods and drinks for them to enjoy.

2. Community Reading Challenges

What better place to build partnerships within your school’s community than at the local library? Local libraries often run special summer programs. While working together, you and the library can make a community-wide reading challenge.

Some libraries host summer reading events to keep students on track. They may host weekly events during which students can finish reading while completing a thematic craft or activity.

Collaborate with the library ahead of time and decide how you’ll do the following:

• reading goals,
• progress-tracking, and
• celebrate achievements together.

You can design reading passports or use online platforms like Glose for Education to track students’ reading. This fosters community and healthy competition while promoting a love for reading.

3. Virtual Book Exchanges

Facilitate a virtual book exchange program where students can swap books with their classmates. Students can write short book reviews or record video recommendations to share with their peers. Share them securely via your school’s learning management tools, or, via the Glose for Education platform as video comments on a text.

You could even suggest a digital book tasting where students create a collaborative slideshow to include:

• Title and author
• YouTube book trailer (premade or student-created), and
• A “you’ll like this if you like….” statement.

This promotes reading and develops students’ communication and critical thinking skills. You’ll also have kids talking about shared interests and bonding, fostering social and emotional health, and building community.

4. Literary Field Trips

Literary field trips are an excellent way for students to explore their reading on a deeper level. Books already take us to magical places and times. The Internet allows us to visit faraway lands, different times, and other dimensions. By combining books with virtual excursions, students witness their books come to life. Students begin connecting to texts and their love of reading grows.

Google Lit Trips is a subscription-based, virtual literary field trip program. In this program, students become virtual traveling companions alongside characters in books. Google Earth is another way for students to visit the settings of various texts. Local libraries also offer discounted and free trips to museums and other cultural happenings that can tie to a summer reading book.

5. Integrate Social Media

Students’ schedules are different during the summertime. Many travel to see family or go to camps — fun experiences that they want to share with their friends. To keep students connected, encourage them to take and share book selfies with a “caught me reading…” caption or hashtag during their travels.

Students can read and comment on their texts and share their selfies securely on the Glose for Education platform. Glose enables students to dive deeply into texts with its:

• interactive tools,
• emoji annotations, and
• discussion-based prompts.

Use Glose’s free lesson plan for summer reading to guide students through engaging and thought-provoking activities that strengthen reading comprehension over the summer.

6. Engage with Real-World Texts

When students think of summer reading, they often think only of books. But books aren’t the only form of text out there!

Urge students to explore reading materials beyond traditional books. Newspapers, magazines, comic books, and online articles all offer a wealth of information on topics of all interests.

Exposure to real-world texts improves understanding of different genres and styles. It opens students to new perspectives. At the same time, they strengthen comprehension skills and text-to-text connections.

7. Attend a Reading Dinner

Disconnect from screens and host a family reading dinner (or brunch, snack, or any other time to get together!). The theme? BYOB: Bring Your Own Book. Everyone in the family sits down, brings a book they’re reading, and reads at the table while enjoying a meal. Parents can have time at the end of the meal to share or allow sharing to happen naturally.

When families read together, it delivers a message that reading is essential, which is the goal of any summer reading program. Plus, the conversations will likely lead to sharing personal experiences. Parents can model making connections and opening up about their lives. Their children may follow suit. Students will improve reading comprehension, yes. But more importantly, this creates shared experiences and fosters connections between family members. Everyone gets better at reading by making personal connections, and everyone gets a little closer, too.

Final Thoughts

Some additional tips to share with families during the summer:

• Encourage choice. Students receive assigned reading all school year long. Summer is a great time to encourage reading for pleasure by letting students choose what they want to read — and that includes the genre, topic, and medium (graphics novels are novels!)
• Audiobooks are an excellent way to get reluctant readers hooked on a text. Solo, they allow anyone, but particularly those who feel the urge to keep moving, a way to read and still get things done. Coupled with reading a physical text, audiobooks improve reading fluency and comprehension, especially for young readers and English Language Learners.
• Make reading part of the summer routine. The BYOB dinner can be a weekly event. Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) or Drop Everything And Read (DEAR) time should be daily activities. It’s worth noting, however, that the BYOB, SSR, and DEAR activities will only encourage reading if everyone in the family participates. Sending a reluctant reader to the couch to read while the grown-ups do chores or scroll on devices isn’t recommended. 😉

It’s essential to mitigate the summer slide’s impact on students’ reading comprehension skills. Shared and relevant experiences engage students in reading without overwhelming them with busy work. Summer reading should be an enjoyable way to maintain the skills students worked so hard to achieve. It’s also the time of year to foster a love for literacy. Let’s make the summer months an opportunity for students to grow as readers and thinkers, and set them up for success in the next school year.

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Glose for Education is an online platform that makes reading a social experience while building comprehension skills. Readers learn from one another by creating shared spaces to interact with digital texts. To learn more about how Glose for Education can support your instruction, click here. And, download this free lesson plan to get students started with an engaging summer reading program.