By Amelia Johnson, 7th grade

Summer is most kids' favorite time of the year because there is no school. Except for summer reading.

What is the Summer Reading Program?

Summer Reading is an activity where students pick a book off of the pre-assigned list and do an activity on it which generally changes year to year. Some kids do it the first week of summer to get it over with, while others forget and do it the last week of summer (or even the first week of school). The big question most kids have is why do we have to do all this work when the work we put in doesn't pay off?

What are the benefits of the Summer Reading Program?

There are plenty of benefits for summer reading: it promotes reading, more kids get interested in the books, helps kids keep their skills up, and improves reading skills. Furthermore, it shows improvements in self esteem, memory skills, and it also improves spelling and fluency. All this time, I thought it just improved your reading skills.

How do we improve the Summer Reading Program so it's more effective?

I believe Summer Reading could be improved if we actually did something with the book. From personal experience, all the teachers say next year you do something with the summer reading books, but we never do except maybe once.

Most of the kids think that their work of reading and filling out the sheet goes down the drain, since nothing is done with it.

The books on the lists always surprise me, and are better than I thought they would be, but the sheet of finding evidence and explaining something about it is basically the same every year. The activity I think should be more exciting like maybe changing the ending of the book, or the setting — something where the kids show they read the book, they understand it, and they can do something critical and creative with it.

The other thing to help improve the program is to have the kids share what they did, so the whole class can see their hard work, and not just the teacher. Let us showcase our learning, and maybe Summer Reading would be worth more of our time and effort.