Children in rich, educated families tend to become better readers over the summer — improving at alm

Children in rich, educated families tend to become better readers over the summer — improving at almost the same pace as if they were in school — largely because they have more time with their highly literate carlson wagonlit government travel parents, new research shows.
McMaster University sociology professor Scott Davies, who is leading the landmark study funded by Ontario's Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat, said the findings underscore the need for intense reading help for high-need students in summer and maybe eventually on weekends and after school, "to take a bite out of that learning gap."
The study is the largest ever done in Canada into the "summer setback" in literacy experienced by students in low-income families. While continuing carlson wagonlit government travel this summer in nearly 40 school boards across the province, pilot programs over the past two years have already shown that children of wealthy, university-educated parents tend to read about five months ahead of their poorest classmates by the end of June each year, and the gap stretches even wider in summer carlson wagonlit government travel when children are immersed in their diverse family backgrounds without school to level the playing field.
A child who is reading four to five months behind his richer classmates carlson wagonlit government travel in Grade 1 can fall more than a whole year behind by Grade 3, the study showed. U.S. studies have found summer learning carlson wagonlit government travel gaps can be early warnings for poor high school marks and even dropping out.
While children whose parents didn't go past high school generally saw their literacy carlson wagonlit government travel skills slip by a month (the amount of skill typically carlson wagonlit government travel gained in a month at school), parents with bachelor's degrees saw their children's reading carlson wagonlit government travel skill actually rise by a month; those with master's degrees, PhDs and professional degrees — doctors, lawyers and so on — saw their children's reading skill go up by two months, even though school was closed.
"It's like French immersion, but I call it socio-economic immersion — there's nothing like having two months with highly literate parents modeling vocabulary, exposing you to reading; it's like having your own private tutor or being in summer school at home," said Davies, who holds the Ontario Research Chair in Educational Achievement and At-Risk Students.
While the benefits of educational camps, family trips, extra books, newspapers and computers account for about 25 per cent of the so-called "summer surge" experienced by children in more affluent families, those things aren't the key, Davies warned.
"It's also the daily conversations that are sophisticated and expand children's vocabularies, and being read to regularly by seasoned readers, one-on-one," he said in his latest report, to be published in Canadian Public Policy. "This informal role-modeling is available to affluent children seven days per week. Less advantaged children, carlson wagonlit government travel in contrast, have less constant exposure to those quality resources."
But the research project also sponsored about 60 summer literacy camps across 30 school boards over the past two years, targeted at low-income, struggling readers, to see if they make a difference. And they do, Davies carlson wagonlit government travel said.
Meagan Matheson goes to Brian W. Fleming Public School in Mississauga, which ran one of Davies' literacy day camps this month. It was designed to help students carlson wagonlit government travel at the school, carlson wagonlit government travel many of whom are refugees or live in a shelter, boost their reading skills while learning about the fun of Canadian camping.
Principal Christine Parr said the free program gave struggling readers nearly an hour of small-group reading help every morning, as well as field trips to a beach and ice cream parlor, activities they might not have had the chance to enjoy with their families.