For the past 15 years, we have had
required summer reading for rising 9th graders. Students select from a wide
variety of books and over the summer are required to read. In the first 2 weeks
of the school year, students are assessed on the reading and have to complete a
book project. What I am seeing is that the majority of students are not doing
the reading, therefor, they are failing the assessment. In the third week of
school over 50% of students are failing LA. It is becoming very
difficult for these students to ‘dig themselves out of the hole.’ I mentioned
to our LA department chairs that we may want to re-think our summer program and
they were not receptive to the idea at all. Several schools in my county have
totally done away with summer reading because of the same reason. Instead, they
do a reading project at the beginning of the school year and allow 5 weeks for
completion. What these schools are finding is that LA scores are the highest
they have been in years. Even after showing the data of success, our department
chairs are still resistant to the idea.
I am looking for suggestions of how to
address our LA department chairs to re-evaluate the summer reading or ways to
encourage (make) our rising 9th graders read.
As part of your articulation, maybe you can connect with your middle school LA teachers to have the students begin reading and starting the introduction of the readings the last three weeks of school. Most middle schools are usually done prepping for their testing and now Milestones. They could use this time for introduction for whats to come
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