Reading for Pleasure in the Summer Holidays

Many years ago both my children were in Key Stage 2. Our family plans for the summer holiday included book shopping as the first priority and a three day visit to our friends in Scotland. Together we walked to the local high street which had a fantastic bookshop with plenty of children’s books to choose from. I wanted them to love reading, and I was fascinated that they both chose the same book genre: Humour. These were not scary or silly books. They were brilliant, funny, laugh out loud books. But if I’m honest, I was a little disappointed that I’d spent my hard-earned money on light fiction, with quite limited vocabulary development on offer. But, I believed they would only read if they enjoyed it, so I paid for the ten books anyway, hoping for the best and carried them home.

Book shopping was something of a ritual at the beginning of each school holiday. (We also went shopping for stationery and new underwear in the same trip.) We were not jetting-off to a sunny beach or to a gorgeous city centre with amazing art and food on offer. Rather we made our journey to Scotland by car, with snacks and drinks to keep us going. After a quiet hour in the car, there came sniggers and snorts of laughter from them both and then silence resumed.

Although they were not reading to build their vocabulary, they were reading for ‘its own sake’. At the time I had no idea where this child-led reading idea would take us, but to this day, they both have very strong reading habits as adults and now rely on reading as the most powerful ‘reset’ after using AI as a normal part of their working day.

I remember these summers as the one ‘season’ when their reading was unobserved. There were no reading records. There was no benchmarking. And nobody was really watching them read. They were free to read as and when they wanted to.

Some children read in the summer holiday, whilst others do not

There have been many occasions when children have told me that they used to pretend to read but now they really like it and don’t need to pretend anymore. Children who were watching videos under the bedclothes switched to using their phones as torches so that they could finish a book when their parents thought they were asleep.

In the summer holidays, children who enjoy reading have a selection of books, written by their favourite authors and they can’t wait to get lost in these. Once they get started, they are entranced, cannot put the book down, and resent any interruption, until permitted to scamper off to their cosy reading spot so as to immerse themselves once again.

How do these children arrive here? It is a destination that seems elusive to some and second nature to others. When each parent has their own book collection, reflecting their interests and reading habits, children learn from a very early age that reading is part of finding out who you are. They learn to see reading as a way to explore your own mind and to really soar into the limitless domains of information and imagination.

Most children depend on their teachers to open their mind to the unlimited possibilities of their imagination and to cultivate their curiosity about ideas. Most children learn to build this identity for themselves. Going to a library or a bookshop can be a wonderful affirmation of everything that their teachers have been telling them. Every book may unlock a new world of discovery. Librarians and booksellers have an important role to play in supporting each child as they navigate the somewhat daunting array of possibilities.

Sometimes a family’s hopes shape a child’s reading in ways that weren’t intended. I once worked with a child who did not learn to read until they were ten. At home, with the best of intentions, reading had been narrowed to one kind of book, and the child had concluded that the rest were not for them. The block this created ran deep and it began to ease in one ten minute session, using a rhythm-based approach. It changed how reading felt from the inside. I have seen this happen for more than twenty years and it still catches me off-guard. The child’s older sibling said, “I’ve never heard [them] just pick up a book and read before today”.

Books, buses and reading at home

The summer is a time of alchemy, when family life either distilLs children’s reading development or dissolves its foundations. The foundations of reading are built at school using structured phonics teaching, and each step in learning to decode is reinforced with appropriate reading materials.

Many families live in homes without books, and without access to libraries or bookshops. Local library services have been cut back as have the bus services that connect families to libraries in city centres. I will never forget how a child who had finished a book for the first time, told me that she would ask her cousin to take her by bus to the library in the city centre. It would take them an entire day to make this trip. I realised that this was more a modern-day pilgrimage, than the beginning of a weekly routine.

It seemed that the children who needed to catch up and who wanted to catch up during the summer holidays relied on being able to access local amenities and their local bus network. There’s a strange irony here. One of the first songs every child learns celebrates a bus that runs happily all day long - wheels turning, doors opening, everyone aboard. Yet for many of the families I’ve worked with, the real bus service that might carry a child to a library has been cut, rerouted, or priced out of the budget for the week.

We teach our youngest children a cheerful fiction about the very infrastructure their reading lives will one day depend on. And this is no longer a niche observation: the argument that communities cannot lift themselves without basic connections (buses among them) is now being made at the highest level of our politics.

So, where does this leave children who must pursue reading for its own sake by themselves? It’s unlikely that they will read. If they wanted to visit a library, someone must be available to take them there to borrow the books and again to return the books. It’s a big ask of families who might be eyeing up the costs of the school uniform in September, preferring to budget instead for home-cooked meals to nourish their children every day.

The children moving between parents who are co-parenting are also challenged by library membership. Taking a library book to the ‘other parent’s place’ adds a layer of complexity to the weekly routine, in which ‘keeping it simple’ works best and minimises friction.

Where co-parents manage to hold the library in the same regard as football practice or maths tutoring, one of the fixed points a child’s week is built around, something powerful emerges. The reading keeps going through the summer, and children return to school having fallen in love, sometimes several times over, with books they found on those shelves.

Getting to know a new class as readers

As children return to school in August and September, and their learning snaps into sharp focus once again, their summer reading and all the exciting things that they did will become distant memories. Teachers may not have any information about their new class at the very beginning of term, and when the spreadsheet does arrive, the numbers will date back to May and June. So there’s a lag, not just in terms of time but also experience. These children have had very different summers. Some have travelled by plane to sunny beaches, some by train to stay with extended family and some by bus, to make a couple of trips into the city centre.

Making sense of it all is important for the children and the teacher too. In a recent post I wrote about an eight-year-old child who had been worried about starting Year 4 because he knew that the work would be too difficult, as he wasn’t reading well. This conversation took place in March. Imagine, dreading the return to school, sitting in an unfamiliar classroom with a teacher who will get to know the children by what they can and cannot do. The child who knows they are failing must wait for their new teacher to realise that they are behind and ‘tread water’ until help arrives.

This early part of the term can feel rather unsettled as the teacher and pupils ‘get to know’ each other. Pupils who have spent the summer travelling and reading on the move start the new term with a broader outlook and expanded horizons. Teachers often notice that children who have spent the weeks on screens for the most part, return finding it harder to gather and hold their focus, whereas those who have spent the summer laughing, chatting and playing with familiar friends and new ones, often return with a focus and stamina that surprise everyone, including themselves.

What if getting to know all of these children could be accomplished in a fraction of the usual time, and teachers were able to pitch every lesson with precision, even in the first week?

The summer reading quiz: A free tool for September

Imagine, beginning the term with a tool that would make teaching more inclusive from day one, because the insights necessary to identify the children needing immediate support or challenge, were available.

The teachers need to know the children’s experiences, attitudes and emotional set-point regarding learning, but particularly reading. Some children will have shared books with family members during the summer as an important part of the day. For others, reading would have been abandoned until the child returned to school. Unlocking these details may help children to feel that they are seen, heard and understood so well that they may begin the new school year feeling a little more hopeful and a little less frightened by the ever-increasing level of challenge in the work that they are expected to accomplish.

There’s no special training required to deliver this quiz. It’s been structured to provide useful insight, and just enough detail about how each child feels about their reading. Each item in the quiz is numbered, so the class can work down the list of items together as the teacher reads a sentence or a question aloud. The children simply circle their answer with a pencil: ‘YES’, ‘NO’ or ‘NOT SURE’. It will take about 15 minutes to complete and there are sections for the children to add ‘Student voice’ by drawing their ‘face’ as a reader and to share more about their favourite reading activities.

This is just a way to ‘get to know’ the class and there are no ‘dimensions’ or ‘categories’ in scoring this quiz. It’s free for you to download, whenever you wish to use it. Click here.

Download the Summer Reading Quiz

Every year when the children return, somewhere in an unfamiliar classroom, a child is sitting, dreading they’ll be ‘found out’ or perhaps they are waiting to be found. Download the quiz to help your school build inclusive practices right from the start of the new academic year.