Creek County Literacy is offering a Summer Reading Camp for first through third grades for students who might need an extra boost to catch up or even get ahead of where they were when they finished school for the year.
The camp, focused on “preventing the summer slide,” will run from July 10th to July 20th, Monday through Thursday. It takes place 9:30 – 11:30 am each morning that it runs. The format will involve someone from the community reading to the children, after which the students will be grouped together to work on things they may be especially struggling with, such as comprehension, fluency, spelling, or phonics.
The “Summer Slide” struggle is real, and it’s becoming more critical to overcome, especially during the earlier years.
“If a child just got out of school, and they don’t do any reading all summer. They’re going to slide back at least three months,” said Judy Cain, who works with Creek County Literacy. “So when they go back to school to attend second grade, they’re really going to be reading at about 1.6 or 1.7 (grade level).”
Cain runs a program called “Caring Grands” for Creek County Literacy, which involves volunteers—usually grandparents or retired teachers—reading to students to help them with their listening and comprehension skills. She says this summer camp was borne out of a desire to provide a more focused approach to students who need extra help.
“We kind of meet the kids at school who are falling through the cracks,” she said. “They don’t have enough space for them to be in special ed or any other special classes, but they’re behind, they’re kind of floundering and not really getting the one-on-one help they need. We try to fill in that gap.”
Oklahoma’s Reading Sufficiency Act requires students in third grade to be reading at grade level by the end of their third-grade year, or risk being held back. This critical time in a child’s school career is when the point at which they are transitioning from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” Being able to adequately take in new information and make sense of it is paramount to virtually every other aspect of life, including other school subjects like math.
“That’s why it’s so important,” said Stacie Woodruff, a special education teacher with Epic Charter Schools. “If you can’t read [and comprehend] the math problem, you’re not going to do well with that.”
“They’re not doing phonics instruction and things like that in fourth grade,” Woodruff said. “These kids that aren’t on grade level, they’re going to struggle the rest of their lives because everything curriculum-wise is geared towards reading to learn the information.”
COVID-19 also threw a wrench into the plans of elementary school reading teachers, and now they’re seeing the effects from the children who were just entering school in 2020.
“You think about those two years, you know, that were just awful,” Cain said. “And now we’ve got those kids that are taking tests for the first time that just have come through COVID, and what we noticed is that there’s so many more kids that need intervention.”
Cain says space is limited, but they will do what they can to ensure that everyone who needs it gets the help they’re looking for. She also encourages those who are able to get involved in the Caring Grands program, which, despite the name, is not actually just for grandparents, but Cain says it is a great way for volunteers to do something meaningful.
“It’s giving you a purpose,” she said. “It’s giving this child that may or may not have grandparents in this town, it’s giving them stability that they know that they’re going to get to see Miss Judy every Tuesday at 10 o’clock. The seniors get as much as they give.”
For more information about Creek County Literacy, the Caring Grands Program, or the upcoming reading camp, call 918-224-9647.
