Keep Your Kids Reading This Summer

Reading Rockets Provides
Engaging Summer Reading Resources

With the coming of summer comes summer reading! And Reading Rockets has lots of resources and ideas you can share to help caring adults encourage kids to learn, read, and have fun in the summer sun.

    Start with a Book, features 24 kid-friendly themes, like dinosaurs, building, animals, sports, superheroes, music and more! Each theme introduces young readers and their families to great fiction and nonfiction books, along with hands-on activities that support reading, writing, and critical thinking skills and links to other great websites and apps with related content. You’ll also find:      

• A helpful how-to for summer learning providers for taking advantage of Start with a Book’s resources 
• Science-themed activity guides that combine great books with easy hands-on activities
• Practical suggestions for using reading time to build a child's reading fluency
• Tips for parents in English, Spanish, and nine other languages to support English language learners
• Start with a Book Mom, Carol Shen. Carol is a stay at home mom of two and a member of the Board of Directors of The Reading Connection. She's blogging for Reading Rockets about her kids' learning adventures using Start with a Book this summer.

Plus, Start with a Book offers Reading Tips to Go to support to parents who need extra help coming up with ideas to keep kids’ reading and writing skills improving over the summer. Subscribers to this free service get 3-4 short text messages per week—all summer long—in English or Spanish.

Please consider sharing Reading Tips to Go with your readers via social media. A recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that San Francisco preschoolers whose parents received text messages with highly-specific tips on reading to their children or helping them sound out letters and words performed better on literacy tests than children whose parents did not receive such messages.

There’s even more to share with families getting ready for summer at Reading Rockets. The "virtual beach bag" of activities is packed for teachers to help them help families get ready for summer and to launch students to fun, enriching summertime experiences.

And the great titles selected by Maria Salvadore in the 2015 Summer Reading Guide will take young readers on summer reading journeys to Paris, Provence, Zimbabwe, the beach, Market Street and more!