A LOVE OF LITERACY
Libraries in The Woodlands help boost children’s reading skills with summer programs
At the George and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Library, children wander between tall shelves with their mothers in tow as they hunt for books. The curiosity of these small, voracious readers spans everything from historical fiction to superhero comic books.
“All the sportsthemed books and sports fact books have been hit pretty hard. The baseball section is almost gone,” said Shelly Lane, the Mitchell Library children’s librarian, with a chuckle.
Books are flying off the shelves at Mitchell Library’s juvenile section this summer as part of the Texas Reading Club, the library’s annual summer literacy program that awards readers of all ages for time spent nosing through books. As of mid-June, more than 2,000 chilAs
dren younger than 12 were registered at Mitchell Library, and an additional 1,350 were participating through the South Regional Library off Lake Robbins Drive.
For each book or 30 minutes of reading time, kids fill out a circle on a colorful sheet of paper to track their progress. After the first 10 circles are filled out — 10 books or 5 hours of reading — each kid gets a goody bag filled with free tickets, coupons and a free paperback book of his or her choosing. Each additional 10 circles puts that child in for a gift raffle. The program runs through July 15.
“If we start them off young, loving the library, loving books, wanting to be here, then we’re growing readers. The younger we start that, the better,” Lane said. “We joke sometime that we’ve done our job if they’re screaming when they leave because they’re having to leave. That’s a good sign to me.”
Mitchell Library and its sister branch in The Woodlands, the South Regional Library, had nearly 43,000 juvenile books in circulation for the month of June, which is about 62 percent of the Montgomery County Memorial Library System’s total circulation of children’s books between its seven locations.
Mindy Jones is a regular at Mitchell Library with her seven-year-old daughter, who will be advancing to the second grade at Buckalew Elementary School this fall. Her daughter loves “The Baby-Sitters Club” and the “Confectionately Yours” series. After Jones’ two other children finish their summer camp, she hopes to bring all of her children for regular trips to the library.
“We keep up education in the summer and make it fun,” Jones said. “The kids love coming here because they have different things to do. We can read here, check out books, learn on a computer and then there’s the extra activities they can do.”
While the library encourages reading for fun, books help kids keep up their literacy skills during the summer months when they typically receive no classroom instruction. Educators refer to the loss of reading and writing skills during the season as “summer slide,” where some students, particularly kids from low-income homes, lose more than two months of reading skills, according to a John Hopkins School of Education study.
By the eighth grade, the reading achievement gap between those who read through the summer and those who don’t was about three years, according to research by Richard Allington, a professor of education at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville who has published more than 100 studies on theory and practice in teacher education.
“It actually is a real thing,” said Jepilyn Matthis, coordinator of elementary language arts and early childhood education at Conroe Independent School District, about the impacts of summer slide. “Everybody has good intentions at the start of the summer, ‘We’re going to go to the library every week and get new books.’ Then the summer starts, and life happens. You look up, and it’s suddenly August, and nobody has done anything. That’s what happens.”
Though CISD doesn’t sanction district-wide summer reading programs, campuses and individual teachers offer reading lists, and public libraries are a highly recommended community resource.
For families where both parents are working, regular trips to the library can be difficult to schedule. But maintaining a child’s reading and writing skills can be as simple as keeping a journal for logging thoughts and a handful of simple-to-read books in the car and other hightrafficked, strategic locations. And with the proliferation of tablets and smartphones, parents can download books and applications that improve academic skills.
“That’s one thing parents don’t often think about. They’ll download books for themselves, but they forget they can download books for their children. I see a lot of parents in restaurants handing children an iPad or iPhone to keep them occupied. So what if on that iPad, instead of a game, they pulled up a book?” Matthis said.
Making summer learning a priority for families is important for re-structuring quality time and scheduling regular visits to the library or other learning hubs.
For good old-fashioned books, Montgomery County public libraries are open late into the evening Monday through Thursday and on Saturdays, which can accommodate working families. The book dropoff is open 24/7.
“If you’re not using a skill, you’re going to lose it,” Matthis said. “We’re all like that.”