School Library Journal» Summer Slide

Fight the Summer Slide—with a Library Card | Annie Murphy Paul

SLJ — Tue, 16 Jul 2013 11:00:26 +0000

How to counter the “summer slide”? Simple, kids during the out-of-school months should read more books, according to Annie Murphy Paul. And libraries play a critical role, as the journalist and author documents in a recent post, republished below.

Murphy Paul, who writes a weekly column for Time.com and has written several books, including The Cult of Personality (S&S, 2005) and the upcoming Brilliant: The New Science of Smart (Crown, 2014), specializes in how people learn.

This fall, she will deliver the keynote address at SLJ’s Leadership Summit held this year in Austin, TX, September 28-29.

A Simple Way To Push Back Against the “Summer Slide”

By Annie Murphy Paul

They appear every summer as reliably as the stories about shark attacks: a rash of articles raising the alarm about the “summer slide,” or the loss of learning that grade-school students experience over the months when classes are out. Concern about this leads many a parent to stock up on workbooks and flashcards, or to enroll their children in educational camps and enrichment programs. But is the summer slide really the seasonal disaster that we’ve been warned about? A close look at the research reveals a more complicated picture.

For kids from middle and upper-middle income households, for example, the summer slide doesn’t exist at all—at least in terms of reading skills. Affluent children actually make slight gains in reading over the summer months, according to an analysis of 13 research studies led by Harris Cooper, professor of education at Duke University. Meanwhile, lower-income kids lose more than two months of reading achievement over the same period. (The math skills of both affluent and less-affluent kids tend to decline over the summer break.)

Even among underprivileged students, however, the summer slide is not universal. A study published last year in the Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk reported that “not all low-SES [socio-economic status] students experience summer learning loss.” The authors, led by Johns Hopkins University sociologist Stephanie Slates, identified a sample of poor children from Baltimore who gained as much as their higher-SES peers in reading or math during at least three of the four summers of elementary school.

What makes these “outliers” different? Their parents, the investigators found, are significantly more likely than other low-income parents to take their children to the library during the summer and to check out books while there. The parents of these “exceptional summer learners” also read to their children for longer periods of time, and are more likely to check their children’s homework and have higher expectations for their children’s conduct grade during the school year—“types of parental involvement that could well carry over into the summer months,” the researchers note.

As simple as it sounds, reading books can reverse the summer slide in literacy skills for even the poorest children. Richard Allington, a professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and his colleagues found that giving kids twelve books to read over the summer was as effective as summer school in raising the students’ reading scores. The increase in test scores was especially pronounced for those who were most economically disadvantaged.

The children in Allington’s study were allowed to pick their own books, and while parents may cringe at their selections (most popular: a biography of Britney Spears), the researchers believe that giving students a choice of reading material is a critical part of their intervention: not only are the kids more motivated to read the books, but the words and facts they learn build on knowledge they already possess.

Another study, this one led by James Kim of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, found that regardless of family income, the effect of reading four to five books over the summer was large enough to prevent a decline in reading achievement scores from the spring to the fall. Kim’s other finding: children who said they had easy access to books over the summer ended up reading more. So seasonal alarm bells aside, the best way to push back against the summer slide is with your library card.

Other articles of interest by Annie Murphy Paul:

Save The Readers! A Defense of “Deep Reading”

The Epidemic of Media Multitasking While Learning

Rules For Thinking In A Digital World

How To Stimulate Curiosity

To learn more about the summit and to register, visit the event page or email sljevents@mediasourceinc.com.

Photo by John Morgan.

YALSA’s Best YA Fiction; Stop the Summer Slide; A Fake Blake | News Bites

Phyllis Levy Mandell — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 16:49:40 +0000

The nominees for the 2013 Teens’ Top Ten have just been announced by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA). These titles were published between January 1 and December 31, 2012. From the list of 28 books for ages 12 to 16, teens are encouraged to vote for their favorites between August 15 and September 15. The 10 nominations that receive the most votes will be named the official Teens’ Top Ten and will be announced during Teen Read Week, October 13–19, 2013.

Teens are encouraged to read the books before they vote. The nominated titles include: Every Day by David Levithan (Knopf), Son by Lois Lowry (Houghton Harcourt), The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater (Scholastic), and Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein (Hyperion). Download this PDF for the full list.

Stop the Summer Slide

“Children not reading at grade level by the beginning of fourth grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school,” said Barbara Lurie, co-founder and executive director of Kids Read Now, speaking at the recent Clinton Global Initiative America (CGI America) meeting in Chicago.

She attributes this in large part to the “summer reading slide.” Kids Read Now’s summer reading program focuses on children in first through third grades and is supported by the One Call Now Foundation. Children in participating schools receive books to keep. Their progress is tracked by phone calls made to families through One Call Now. At its inception in 2011, the program worked with seven schools in Ohio to help improve reading levels. In 2012, 40 schools in Georgia, New York, and Ohio participated: 2,000 children received more than 11,000 books.

According to Kids Read Now, they are expanding the program to include data collection that will allow them to measure results and make improvements as necessary.

Digital Content

Channel One News, a digital video content provider, has revamped ChannelOne.com to make it “easier to access, share, and interact with Channel One News’s bite-sized, educational videos and supplemental resources from any device, since mobile and tablet devices are increasingly being used in the classroom.” Channel One News is expanding its digital distribution so the daily news program, video segments on thousands of topics, blog posts from reporters, and supplemental resources aligned with Common Core State Standards can be accessed inside and outside the classroom. Also, ChannelOne.com has launched “Impact,” a resource that connects students who are interested in service-based initiatives with organizations.

“Channel One News has been in classrooms across the country for more than 20 years, and we’ve always believed that the news is a powerful tool to spark important conversations and real world learning,” noted Channel One News Chief Executive Officer, CJ Kettler. “But we also recognize that teachers’ classroom routines are changing due to the increased use of technology and mobile devices in schools. With the new ChannelOne.com, teachers and students can use the news and real world events to enable authentic learning both in and outside of the classroom. We’re excited about the opportunities that exist to continue to serve the educational community by further leveraging our non-fiction content through strategic partnerships.”

Library Giveaway

To celebrate 25 years of children’s book publishing, Chronicle Books is offering The Chronicle Kids YA Summer Library Giveaway. If you are least 13 years old, just click on the link, fill in your name and email address, and submit it to Chronicle Books by July 3, 2013. The winner, selected by a random drawing, will receive signed copies of The Space Between Trees by Katie Williams, The Orphan of Awkward Falls by Keith Graves, Prisoners in the Palace by Michaela MacColl, copies of Nobody’s Secret by Michaela MacColl, How I Stole Johnny Depp’s Alien Girlfriend by Gary Ghislain, Spinning Out by David Stahler Jr., The Templeton Twins Have an Idea by Ellis Weiner, and advanced readers copies of Weiner’s The Templeton Twins Make a Scene and Collean Gleason’s The Clockwork Scarab.

A Fake Blake

A school librarian at Hitchin Boys’ School in the UK has discovered that “Two Sunflowers Move into the Yellow Room,” a poem attributed to 19th-century English poet William Blake, was actually written by American author Nancy Willard and published in an anthology, A Visit to William Blake’s Inn (Harcourt, 1981). The article about Thomas Pitchford’s discovery was published recently in a BBC News story. Many schools have been teaching the poem as an example of Blake’s work. Pitchford’s blog, the Library Spider, has examples of how the poem was attributed to Blake and has been used in classrooms.