At-Home Summer Reading Programs for Kids

Our local library usually does an amazing summer reading program, complete with special events, free books and lots of fun prizes for kids who participate (we won a free birthday party one year!).

Of course things are different this year, and a lot of the events are virtual. As my kid gets older, too, the prizes are not as appealing and she’s not sure she wants to participate this year, but it’s still great to have some way to encourage more reading in the summer.

Her school has done the Scholastic Summer Reading Program for many years but they’re not really doing it as a school this year. (It looks like you can sign up individually, though, and it is free to do so.)

I like the idea of designing your own summer reading program, with goals and rewards that work for your kid. That way you can choose how much reading time needs to happen per day or week, how you want to track it, what sorts of rewards might be involved, even a theme for the types of books you want to read.

Example: read 20 minutes a day, a book that was made into a movie, with the reward of watching the movie and a special snack when it’s done. Or books where the main character or author has the same first name as your child.

Check out this post from The Ardent Biblo for more tips on how to set up your own summer reading program. If you need some ideas for new books to add to your list, this guide from Growing Book by Book looks fun. And don’t miss my printable summer reading logs from Our Daily Craft.

[Photo: The Ardent Biblio.]

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Summer Reading Printables and Tips for Parents

If you have a little one learning their letters at home or at school, it can be helpful to know a bit about the science that goes into learning your letters and how the experts teach letter recognition.

Knowing the alphabet is the basis for learning how to read, so it’s important to get it down. Kids need to know the differences between letters, to be able to recognize their shapes and to know what sounds the letters make individually before they can start combining them in words.

Proud to Be Primary suggests starting with letters that are meaningful to the child such as the letters in their name. Tracing letters and doing letter matching and other games with letters are great ways to start kids on the road to recognizing letters. Then things like alphabet songs, books and picture cards can be added in to help with phonics and the basics of reading.

This Crafty Mom talks about using the Carnine method for teaching letter recognition, which starts with all lowercase letters and separates letters that look similar to each other (like b and d, or c and e). This makes a lot of sense because it’s not as confusing, and you can learn alphabetical order later.

How Wee Learn uses a slightly different order but the idea is the same, though she also would start with the letters in a child’s name, then go on with the rest of them. This post includes more fun games for letter recognition including digging up letters and taping letters on the floor for kids to throw paper airplanes on.

Looking for more fun ways to learn the alphabet and letter recognition? This Kaboom game from The Many Little Joys is easy to make, fun for little kids, and once you’ve used it to learn letters you can make a new version for sight words, numbers, basic math problems and more.

Early Learning Ideas has tons of letter activities including collages, crafts, tactile letter cards, letter recognition activities and much more. Do one letter a day or a week and your kiddos will know their letters in no time. And be sure to grab these cute printable alphabet books from Life Over Cs, which give kids easy activities for recognizing letters and words that begin with them.

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