Unique Summer Reading Strategy for Homeschoolers!

You know those moments that you decide not to read certain sections in a book during the school year? Well, you can go back and read those missed sections of learning during the summer while school is out. There’s always a time that we can flip back to those unread words when we need something to read.

Most of the time once we’ve moved on from a particular chapter or page, we wouldn’t dare even think about going back to it to see what we’ve missed. When we don’t look backwards in books, we miss key details. Therefore, we’re only getting a piece of the entire puzzle of the material that we’ve previously read.

Summer Reading Strategy: Read Those Missed Pages For More Information

Homeschooling 7 children is definitely no easy task. We do a lot of group reading and have many oral discussions. Since so much time is spent on those particular areas, we tend to skip some things in our reading at the moment that we don’t deem to be useful or helpful to our discussion or assignment.

Once the summer time rolls around, I often think of reading material that I feel my kids would enjoy in those 2 months that we lighten our school load. Summer reading is a great way for them to keep their knowledge of vocabulary and comprehension skills sharp.

One day a light bulb went off for me as I pondered a summer reading list for them. Why not just have them use the same books for the summer that we used during reading class? Nothing extra to buy and nothing extra to assign that they weren’t already familiar with. Perfect idea. For example, in history we’d covered the Middle Ages in 2 chapters in our book. I didn’t find it to be relevant at the time to cover the list of wars or the endless list of names of people listed that went over and beyond the few people we’d already covered.

The perfect time to read and learn the list would be the summer months. They could also flip back and read the chapter we skipped about a lot of wars in the past. We’d covered almost 10 in class, but hey, learning more during the summer wouldn’t hurt at all.

In science we had skimmed our chapters on oceans because we’d studied them in the past. Well, I had them to go back and read about the various underwater volcanoes and formation of islands because we didn’t cover that part in class. Since the children were already familiar with a bit of oceanography, them going back to read the missed information was pertinent to completing their mental picture about oceans. There were a lot of interesting facts that they came to me with and discussed once they went back to read the pages independently.

In our literature class, we’d studied a few poets from the southern part of the US. The children were delighted to flip through their poetry books and read about the few poets that we didn’t cover. That led to them looking into their biographies of those famous writers. My kids even took it upon themselves to go and find books that we didn’t complete a few years ago and chose their own pages to read over. It was amazing how much initiative that they took to read without my input.

LEARN NEW DETAILS IN SUMMER READING

I couldn’t believe all of the little facts and details that we missed in our plight of trying to get school done and touch on all the basic skills. It’s a simple process. I told my kids to “Go find the books that we used in class and find the skipped chapters.” From that little instruction, they became totally independent readers in those moments that it was too hot to play outside. They were reading books that I had forgotten all about. It’s worked wonders for us and keeps the kids constantly learning new facts and new words.

We now do oral reviews after they’ve read something new and their recall is amazing. They see me involved but in a way they’re choosing what to learn. We use summer reading to serve 2 purposes; Read for information and read to complete the lessons from before. I will never change the way we do summer reading at our house now. It’s perfect for our family.

Can you think of a way to utilize those skipped reading sections in your child’s summer reading? I’d love to read your replies in the comment section. Thanks so much for reading this!

Tal Hoover is the founder of Blessed Grove Homeschooling and Academy. She is a professional educator, curriculum writer and homeschooling mother of 7 children. Her spare time is spent creating and publishing educational resources and operating her small baking business. She has over 14 years of home education under her belt, and nearly a decade of experience in tutoring, online education, and writing. Tal specializes in teaching Biblical and world history, multicultural studies, comparative religions, art history, and of course, professional artisan cookie decorating. She has a bachelor’s degree in Leadership and also holds multiple certificates. Mission work, mentoring and empowering not only her own family, but others is her top priority. She loves connecting with those that are seeking to educate their own children and become entrepreneurs to promote self-sufficiency.