These last couple weeks of school are just flying by with all the hustle and bustle of our End of Year celebrations. I am so very proud of all that my firsties have accomplished this school year.

The end of the year brings such a flurry of emotions. Excitement for summer, inspiration for a new school year, relief, stress, and the anticipation of less stress. Woot!

However, with that, the last day blues may start to kick in and you begin to worry that your young readers will forget all the wonderful strategies you taught them throughout the year. The dreaded “summer slide”…

To help combat this fear, my students set reading goals for themselves to help hold them accountable. We created Summer Reading Goal Paper Chains!

I began by telling my students the truth of what happens to students over summer break….the “summer slide”. They were appalled by this news. I asked them what could they do to avoid such a phenomenon. I happily received a smart answer: READ during the summer.

At this point, my students began making statements that they were going to read EVERY day. But then others piped in, and said they may not be able to do that because of family vacations and of course some of my firsties have a summer birthday so they would be too busy to read on that day (they are too cute).

This led to discussion of how many days long our summer vacation is. So, we counted: 76! We had a serious discussion of what was an acceptable number of days to read since summer was a busy time with their families.

At the primary level, I found it best to measure reading by days rather than by the number of books since there is a great variation in their reading levels. Some students are reading chapter books while others may still be approaching grade level standards.

They then began to set realistic reading goals for themselves and recorded them on a Summer Reading Goal Sheet (available HERE at my TpT store):