Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from our live webinar, “Summer Success: Retaining Literacy Skills Beyond the School Year,” featuring Dr. Lucy Hart Paulson, Co-author of LETRS and Professor of Education at Stanford University.
💡 Want to watch the full discussion? Access the on-demand webinar recording here.
Without consistent practice, students can lose up to two months of their reading ability over the summer break. When school resumes in the fall, educators often spend up to eight weeks reviewing material just to bring children back to their previous achievement levels.
As early literacy expert Dr. Lucy Hart Paulson noted during our session, this "summer slide" resembles a landslide for early readers if their foundational skills are not actively maintained. However, with a few consistent, short, and engaging routines at home, we can turn that steep landslide into a fun, productive path into the next school year.
Strategies for Summer Literacy Success
- Two months of reading ability are often lost during the summer without intervention.
- Eight weeks of review are typically required at the start of the school year to recover lost skills.
- Orthographic mapping binds a word's spelling, pronunciation, and meaning together for instant recognition.
- Phonics relies on phonemes; without phoneme awareness, phonics instruction is incomplete.
- Daily routines should be short, taking only 10 to 15 minutes of consistent practice to be effective.
What Are the Foundations of Early Literacy?
Reading is built on the foundation of language that begins developing long before a child ever picks up a book. According to the "Reading is Language" model developed by researchers Maggie Snowling and Charles Hulme, literacy is rooted deeply in our earliest communication experiences. To retain literacy skills at school, home, and everywhere, we must focus on three core areas.
1. Oral Language
Children need rich exposure to spoken language to build their vocabulary and learn grammatical structures. Encouraging children to speak in full, complete sentences is one of the most powerful tools for developing their literacy.
2. Phonological Awareness
This involves tuning into the sound structure of language. When children learn to blend sounds to create words or segment words into individual sounds, they are building the critical auditory skills required to decode text on a page.
3. Print Knowledge
This is the mechanical understanding of letters and words. It encompasses recognizing alphabet shapes, identifying the specific sounds those letters represent, reading words accurately, and applying that knowledge to spelling and handwriting.
How Does Orthographic Mapping Help Readers?
Orthographic mapping is the mental glue that bonds a word's spelling, pronunciation, and meaning together in a reader's memory. When a child looks at a word, they should not just memorize it as a visual shape on a flashcard. Instead, they need to map the letters (orthography) directly to the speech sounds (phonology).
As Dr. Paulson explained, this process happens in nanoseconds for proficient readers. Even when we read silently, we pronounce every word inside our heads. If a student struggles to read, they often haven't built strong orthographic mapping skills, making it difficult for them to flex their pronunciation based on the context of a sentence.
“Without phoneme awareness, all you have left of phonics is 'ics'.”
Dr. Lucy Hart Paulson
How Can We Build a Vocabulary Routine at Home?
A structured vocabulary routine helps children confidently understand and use new words in their daily lives. Dr. Paulson shared a powerful example from a kindergarten classroom where students were reading a decodable book containing the word "tad". Most students did not know what the word meant until the teacher paused to explicitly define it.
Say the Word Out Loud
Introduce the new word clearly and have the child repeat it back to you. This ensures they can physically produce the sounds and recognize the word's auditory structure.
Provide a Friendly Definition and a Gesture
Explain the word using simple language. Pair the definition with a physical gesture, which Dr. Paulson calls a "kinne". Connecting a gesture to a concept increases engagement and provides a physical pathway for learning.
Use the Word in a Sentence
Have the child share the word's meaning with you or a sibling, and then place the word into a grammatically correct sentence. In the classroom example, understanding that "a tad" means "a little bit" completely unlocked the story's meaning for the students.
How Do We Foster Summer Success?
Summer learning should be highly consistent, incredibly brief, and genuinely fun. Caregivers should establish a set routine, such as reading during breakfast or right before bed, to signal that literacy practice is a normal part of the day. Practice only needs to last 10 to 15 minutes to be highly effective.
To support this, Just Right Reader provides Take-Everywhere Literacy Packs™. These packs empower families with Science of Reading–aligned decodables specifically designed to accelerate reading achievement. Every decodable includes a QR code linking to a teacher-led video phonics lesson, available in 14+ languages, ensuring families know exactly how to support their child's phonics practice at home.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the summer reading slide?
The summer reading slide is the loss of academic skills over the summer break. Students can lose up to two months of their reading ability if they do not practice foundational literacy skills while school is out.
How long does it take to recover from the summer slide?
It can take educators up to eight weeks of intensive review at the beginning of the school year to help children regain the reading levels they had achieved by the end of the previous year.
What is orthographic mapping?
Orthographic mapping is the cognitive process where a reader securely binds a word's spelling, its pronunciation, and its meaning together in their memory for instant recognition.
How long should daily summer reading practice last?
Summer reading practice should be kept short and engaging. Setting aside just 10 to 15 minutes of consistent daily practice is highly effective for maintaining early literacy skills.
Why is speaking in full sentences important for early readers?
Encouraging children to speak in full, grammatically correct sentences builds their oral language foundations, which directly supports their reading comprehension and future writing abilities.
Dr. Lucy Hart Paulson
Speech and Language Pathologist & Early Literacy ConsultantDr. Paulson is an educator and literacy expert with a strong focus on early childhood literacy development. She integrates evidence-based research into practical educational settings and is the co-author of LETRS for Early Childhood Educators.
