By Jan Pease
I’ve been telling
students about an experience we had at the Minnesota Zoo one summer a few years
ago. We were sitting in the tiger house
when suddenly a huge, male Amur tiger came in to view. I felt that one minute I was looking at the
brush, and then this huge beast came out of nowhere. It was amazing, to say the least. There
really was no tiger in sight, and suddenly there was a TIGER! I was so glad to
have thick glass between us.
I feel that way about the school year. It seems to be winter, winter, winter, spring and SUDDENLY! It’s summer!
With the school year finishing so soon, I need to remind
parents and grandparents about a problem called “summer slide.” Our summer reading program, iREAD, from the
Illinois Library Association, states on its website that “Young people
experience learning losses when they don’t engage in educational activities
during the summer. Research spanning 100
years shows that students typically score lower on standardized tests at the
end of summer vacation than they do on the same tests at the beginning of the
summer. Libraries are part of the solution.” 
One statistic that I’ve found on the educational site,
Oxfordlearning.com, an educational site based in Canada, is that students lose
an average of two months of their reading achievement over the summer
break. Students may lose as much as 2.6
months of math achievement over the summer.
The problem expands as students go farther in
school. The video website youtube.com has several significant videos about the
education gap. To watch them, go to
www.youtube.com and search for the NBC News video with Brian Williams called “Summer Learning.” There is also a really good
video called “ the 6,000 hour Learning Gap.” Each of these present an easy-to-understand
look at a national problem.
https://youtu.be/ZolcNG3GVCs
https://youtu.be/l8i4U-WWfho
https://youtu.be/ZolcNG3GVCs
https://youtu.be/l8i4U-WWfho
I suggested to a group of third-grade students that the
answer to this problem might be having year round school. They gave a resounding NO! They do like that long summer break. As we move farther and farther away from
being a rural, agriculture – based community, year round school with
significant breaks of, say, 4 weeks might be an option.
It isn’t all just work.
Summer reading time lets students have the chance to choose what they
want to read. Reading for fun, not just
reading enough to get by, is part of what produces a fluent reader.
There was once a girl in Iowa who liked to daydream away
her school days. She remembers going to
school in the fall, having forgotten how to hold her pencil. Sad story, but true. Don’t let your children be that little girl
(although she turned out ok!)
See you at the library!
