| Dear Parent/Guardian, Tupelo High School supports summer reading programs that achieve the goal of continuing our students’ education in the summer through reading and writing opportunities. Not only are students’ most recently acquired skills maintained but students will also enter school in the fall with connections to ideas that will spark interesting learning discussions from the very beginning of the year. One of the departmental goals for summer reading is to guide students to be creative and independent thinkers through reading, discussion, and writing. Summer reading also provides an opportunity for students to establish a broad literary foundation, to enhance cultural literacy, and to develop their reading comprehension and vocabulary skills. We furthermore believe that in addition to the required books for each grade, allowing students some managed choice of what they read will have lasting benefits. Richard Allington, who is professor of education at the University of Tennessee and author of What Really Matters for Struggling Readers: Designing Research-Based Programs and co-author of Classrooms that Work: They Can ALL Read and Write, points to a meta-analysis of classroom reading instruction that he says “shows having access to interesting texts, choice, and collaboration/conversation, [produce] an effect on achievement two to three times as large as the National Reading Panel found for the effect of systematic phonics instruction.” (This analysis is presented in a chapter by John Guthrie and Nicole Humenick in The Voice of Evidence in Reading Research.) From his own research, Allington points to an exemplary teacher study in which students were allowed “managed choice.” That is, students were given a number of texts to select from—texts of a common genre, on a common theme, or historical era, and so on (excerpted from http://www.ncte.org/collections/summerread/readings). The summer reading assignments will be given to students prior to dismissal for summer vacation. Students must bring their books of choice to class on the following date: THS English Department Faculty |
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