The summer is a special time that many kids anticipate for months in advance. It’s the idea of freedom, sunshine, adventures, and all the exciting things that could be happening soon.

But, when you are homeschooling, your activities need to grab their attention. So, it helps if you have a fun way to introduce homeschool summer reading and combine reading with other activities.

Homeschooling isn’t easy, and during the summer it can often seem like a lot like time is spent trying to think of things to do that are educational and enjoyable. After all, the weather is nice and kids want to be outside.

Many children also find it difficult to focus or to entertain themselves at this time of year. They look to parents and carers for ideas of what to do next, what to study next, and what to read next. This is why structured homeschool summer reading makes so much sense.

When approached in the right way, reading can be a great way to keep them entertained and expand their minds at the same time. But, it is better if it isn’t enforced reading and not set up in a boring way.

Make your family want to read this summer, exploring the outdoors, different worlds, and entire universes through books. Since COVID-19, many more are staying home to protect their families and a lot have had to turn to home-schooling.

This makes reading the perfect hobby to introduce during the summer vacation. If you can get them to love it, it could become a lifetime hobby as well.

Create a Reading Adventure

The key to making this fun is how it is introduced and connecting reading with other benefits in the real world. Make a game out of the action of reading and what they read.

To do this, you could make a racetrack, bingo boards, a ladder challenge or similar to track their progress. Each level can have fun challenges for reading and even prizes.

The challenges can be an entire book, the number of pages read, type of stories read, places in stories, what stories are about and much more. You could even set information or skills as challenges.

Scavenger Hunting Through Books

Once you have your game boards setup, in addition to the main reading challenges, consider setting a scavenger hunt for the books.

Choose a lot of common items that are normally in stories and the world in general, so that it isn’t too difficult for them to collect a lot of items. Then add a few double or triple point items that are going to be more difficult to find.

This will not only work as an encouragement to get them reading, but also to make for exciting moments in normal parts of the stories as they stumble upon another item in the scavenger hunt.

At the end of the hunt, place a prize or money so they feel rewarded for their efforts.

Endless Opportunities

There are so many ways that this can be approached. Just look for fun twists and challenges that can be combined with reading.

However, it is important that they have a vast library of suitable books and support for reading. With the right support, young ones needn’t feel overwhelmed, frustrated, or embarrassed.

This is where Readability comes into play. A huge and colorful library helps to keep kids interested. However, our AI is what most parents really love.

The AI provides 24/7 support for their reading, including correcting pronunciation, reading aloud, providing suggestions for the next book (level appropriate) and much more. This allows parents to take a break, while the learners continue to get support.

Not only that but with comprehension checking in an innovative and ‘chatty’ style verbal Q&A, children feel like they are chatting with an online tutor.

Readability features include:

• Approved by education experts
• Stories that are educational, but fun
• Colorful illustrations
• Level appropriate content suggested by interactive AI
• Interactive Voice-based Questions and Answers (IVQA™)
• Available 24/7/365
• Dashboard for parents
• Live reports on progress

The price is low, in fact, you’d likely pay more for only access to the library with many other reading apps. Parents get full reports including “accuracy, comprehension and daily time spent reading”.

As the app is mobile, it can be used in favorite places, the garden, park, or other places for an hour or two of reading out of the house.

Rewards for Achievements

The activities we set earlier help to make reading fun and lead to rewards. As parents can also see live progress and commitment, they can also reward effort and improvement as they see fit.

Never punish a reduction in performance, but instead aim to make a celebration of their achievements. If they have reduced their accuracy score in one week, consider rewarding them for their effort if they read more, or for working hard on comprehension checking.

Making homeschool summer reading fun can be a challenge, but we hope that with our app and the ideas in this article, your summer homeschool can be a bit more enjoyable this year.