Building Effective Programs for Summer Learning

Summer should never be a break in any child's intellectual development. Summer learning can come from reading books, singing songs, playing games, listening to stories, taking trips, and other kinds of fun activities. However, this kind of summer learning can be more difficult for children of low-income and other disadvantaged families since they have less access to material resources such as books and computers and fewer enriching experiences such as family trips and summer camps. This paper by an America Reads summer 2000 intern offers suggestions for building a summer learning program that reaches the neediest kids, gets kids learning, and keeps going strong.

The goal of the paper is to introduce effective practices for building a summer learning program that reaches the neediest kids, gets kids learning, and keeps going strong.

On average, children from low-income families usually have less access to material resources such as books and computers, fewer enriching experiences such as family trips and summer camps, as well as fewer high-quality educational interactions with their parents, whose time and energy are often consumed by the challenges of struggling with poverty. Summer learning programs can help bridge the gap. Also, a study of students in Baltimore, reported by Karl Alexander and Doris Entwisle (1996), found that all children make gains at essentially the same rate during the school year, and that only during the summer months do disadvantaged kids' scores fall behind. Disadvantaged kids' summer losses are especially large during the breaks between the first three or four years of school.