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Many children tend to fall behind during the summer unless they are given the attention and resources they need during these months. Having access to books during the summer helps to reinforce good learning habits and is critical to maintaining a child's achievement level. Children who lack the access to books and the opportunities to read will fall behind each summer.
During the school year, lower-income children's skills improve at close to the same rate as their more advantaged peers - but over the summer, middle- and upper-income children's skills continue to improve, while lover-income children's skills do not. (Alexander, 2007)
It has been said that by the age of 9 children are learning to read...after age 9 children read to learn. Children that do not learn to read by age 9 often perform lower and become low achievers; don't go to college or even drop out of school. Because of this they are less likely to get jobs and may even turn to drugs or criminal activities.
The purpose of the our Summer Reading Literacy Project is to promote literacy to our youth and encourage them to learn to read; with the hopes of having them learn to like or even love to read. To accomplish this our goal is to deliver Summer Reading "Gifts" to each student and have read aloud sessions to the students upon delivery.
Sun View Elementary School is one of the lowest performing schools in Huntington Beach. You often find that children that attend these lower performing schools can often come from lower-income families and they don't or won't have access to reading material over the summer. Here are the 2012 Sun View CST scores:
- Grade 2 English Language Arts -30% proficient or better (32% proficient or better
in 2011)
- Grade 3 English Language Arts - 42% proficient or better (40% proficient or better
in 2011)
- Grade 4 English Language Arts - 68% proficient or better (60% proficient or better
in 2011)
- Grade 5 English Language Arts - 55% proficient or better (77% proficient or better
in 2011)
Here are the student counts for each grade level:
K - 46
1 - 45
2 - 57
3 - 38
4 - 53
5 - 57
We will be "wrapping" each Summer Reading Packet with ribbon to create added excitement and show that it is "fun" to get books as gifts. By showing our children that it is fun to read (during the read-aloud sessions) and giving them reading materials that BELONG to them and that they can trade or borrow from/with their friends; we are encouraging the reading and learning process. In addition to the reading packets each book will come with a handout/worksheet that we will include in the gifts to help with reading comprehension.
Upon approval of the grant we will order the books from Scholastic. Once the books arrive we will have members of our club assemble each Summer Reading Packet with the appropriate number of books. We have scheduled with the school May 31st as our delivery date. On this day we will "present" the books at their Flag assembly in which the entire school (students, faculty and staff) along with some parents attend. Following the assembly we intend to have "read-aloud" sessions to the grade levels as we pass out the books).
Depending on the funds we plan to purchase Summer Reading 10 book bundles (5 fiction and 5 non-fiction) and maybe 1 or 2 of their Literacy Partner Collections. As i mentioned above it is our intent to separate and regroup the books so that each student in each grade level can take home at least 1 - 2 books (we hope to actually be able to give 2-3 books per student if we get approved for the funds). It is our intent to us the rest of the funds to purchase books for their library or their reward system (if a student acquires a certain amount of points they get to exchange them for a book on the reward shelf to take home and keep).
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