Preventing the “summer slump” in reading: silent reading time AND support for libraries
As the NY Times notes, children from lower-income families tend to fall behind in reading over the summer, and a major reason is that they don’t read very much (“Using summer to narrow achievement gaps,” NY Times, July 31, School Book). The Summer Quest program, described in the Times, is one of the few summer programs I have read about that deals with this situation directly, including 30 minutes a day of silent reading.
Silent reading of self-selected books has been repeatedly shown to be very effective in increasing literacy, as long as there is access to a wide range of reading material, and students are not tested on what they read.