Near the end of the 2020-2021 school year, our principal mentioned the idea of setting up a Summer Reading Program for our school. In my years of volunteering with PTA, programs that promote literacy have always been my favorite, so I was excited to take his ideas and run with them to create a new program that would benefit our students and their families while building literacy skills.
- To help prevent "summer slide" for our students by encouraging to continue reading over the summer. Reading over the summer can be self-directed which allows students to choose what they read and helps them to build an enjoyment of reading that might not develop when the reading is assigned.
"The concept of the summer slide has been on researchers’ radar since at least 1996, when one of the first comprehensive studies on the phenomenon was published. The study showed that kids lose significant knowledge in reading and math over summer break, which tends to have a snowball effect as they experience subsequent skill loss each year. A more recent study of children in 3rd to 5th grades also showed that students lost, on average, about 20 percent of their school-year gains in reading and 27 percent of their school-year gains in math during summer break." - Scholastic.com
- The combined efforts of our students reading over the summer will help us build a new fence mural at the school, allowing students to see that they were part of building something great. Each student who turns in a completed reading log will earn clips to install in the fence mural and their names will be written on the clips.
- To connect families to our social media pages, helping them feel like they are part of our school community, and helping us to reach them with our media posts about other topics, events, etc.
Project (the work):
The first thing I created was a reading log for students to take home to use over the summer to track their reading, along with an introduction to the summer reading program and an outline of the weekly challenges. When these logs are submitted in the fall, each student will earn a number of clips to install in the fence mural. This will also help us track reading for our students over the summer and can give us a total of how many books and pages were read by our students!
I worked on updating our PTA website, making updates not only to the page about Summer Reading, but also to the entire website. Getting things ready for a new school year can be a lot of work, and checking this off of my list while I worked on Summer Reading was a great way to make sure the updates were done before school starts!
Additionally, I created many social media posts for the weekly challenges and to advertise the Summer Reading Program. I used Canva.com to create most of the posts and advertising for the program. Here are just a few of the posts I created: 
- The biggest challenge encountered during this project is that the reach of our social media pages isn't as large as we'd like it to be. While we have about 650 students, the weekly challenges are getting only about 3% participation each week. We are hopeful that the reading log portion of the program will have greater success and that we'll receive more than 3% of our reading logs back when we return to school in the fall.
- Because our school is a magnet school for ALPS students, delivering prizes has been more challenging than anticipated. Some of our students live nearly 30 minutes away! I should have anticipated this challenge, but was surprised by how far some of our families travel to attend our school.
Project processes:
- For the first few weeks, I was creating posts weekly, and during the week of July 4th, I saw that when I became busy with other things, it was much more challenging to keep up with posting. I changed my process, and created posts for the remaining 5 weeks and scheduled them so that part of the process is now automated.
- Each week, entries for the challenge were emailed, messaged, or left as comments on our posts. As each entry came in, I recorded the student's name and how they entered in a spreadsheet. When their name was recorded, I responded to the message letting them know they were entered in the drawing for that week. Then at the end of each week, I used random.org to generate a number and matched the number to the corresponding cell in the spreadsheet, thus selecting the winner for the week.
- I used Canva.com to create the majority of the posts, infographics, and papers that were distributed as part of this program.
An overview of my experiences working on this project:
- Since before my first child was born, I have wanted to find a place where I could volunteer and help children build greater literacy. I learned to love reading from a very young age, and I have always wanted to impart that passion and interest to others. This has been a great opportunity to do just that. As our district moves to a new curriculum this year, I am excited to see how I personally can support the new skill based programs, as well as how I can help our PTA support these programs and help them to increase their reading skills exponentially.
- My favorite part of this project was participating in the program with my own children. I enjoyed taking them to the library each week to select new books that would meet the week's challenge. I loved discovering new interests with them. Checking out non-fiction books, for example, helped open their eyes to a whole new section of the library that they previously hadn't shown much interest in exploring. It has been awesome to see them grow their love for reading.
- I have also enjoyed seeing pictures and getting book suggestions from other families and students who have participated in the summer reading challenges. I have learned a lot from seeing what other kids are reading!
- Delivering prizes has been so much fun. I have loved seeing how excited students are about winning a little prize, and knowing that the prize came because of their efforts to read and learn! I have also loved being able to thank parents in person for their willingness to participate in the summer reading program with their kids!
The insights gained from this project:
- The best insight I had while working on this project was that it's not about how much the students read, but about how much they enjoy reading it. I have worried a bit about my own children selecting books that are young, or too easy for them, but I working on this project has helped me to see that it's more important that they enjoy what they're reading. One week's challenge was to read a book with a raccoon character in it- but we had a hard time finding one, so my daughter read a non-fiction book about raccoons. She hated it! It was long and boring and very wordy. It would have been much better to let her pick something fun to read.
- I also learned about different skills and how doing simple things to change how or what we read can enhance those skills- for example, reading to a pet or stuffed animal is proven to help build reading confidence in children, because they have an audience that won't judge or correct their reading. Reading aloud helps children to hear words and understand phonetics. Reading in a different location than normal can help expand the mind and teach children to read through different sensory inputs, helping them to learn to focus on what they are reading. Each of these skills came into play in the weekly challenges we issued!
- This project was a first for me, in that I was creating a program from scratch. Other programs I've worked on for PTA have always been somewhat put-together or at least had an outline I could follow, so creating this program from scratch was a new experience. As with any big project, I learned some things that I can take with me into future projects. Putting this together on my own has reminded me of how much I value input from other people. I appreciate our principal's willingness to offer suggestions and mentorship as I prepared this program- and I also appreciate that he truly let me make this program into something beyond the original vision! I appreciate the help of other PTA volunteers who assisted with other programs so that I could make this my main focus during some of the busiest weeks of the school year. Most of all, I appreciate a willing office staff who supported this program even when it created more work for them in distributing the logs to every student, in-person, online, or starting kindergarten in the fall. Although this project was my baby, I couldn't have pulled it off without the help of these individuals!
While there are four weeks to go before we return to school and I see the project fully come to a close, I am so thrilled with how it has come together. I have had parents and teachers tell me how much they have appreciated this program, and I hope to continue helping with similar programs in years to come. It has definitely been worth the effort put in to creating the program, because seeing students getting excited about reading has been so rewarding!
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