Keeping Kids Engaged, Excited, and Reading

Keeping Kids Engaged, Excited, and Reading

For decades, the Library of the Chathams has been spearheading the Summer Reading Program that has well over 500 kids reading over 10,000 books and engaging more than 70 middle-school volunteers. How? They make it fun.

Beyond the picnics and prizes, summer is a critical time for students to keep reading. The summer slide is a well-documented event that causes students to lose one to three months of reading development, returning to school needing to rebuild skills they had mastered in the spring. Reading over the summer has been shown to be an effective way to help kids continue to develop their skills, rather than losing what they’ve gained during the school year.

With 29 years of experience at the Library of the Chathams, Head of Youth Services, Jaime Sabonya, knows the impact of Summer Reading firsthand. She notes: “The Summer Reading Club is one of our most important literacy initiatives because it encourages children to keep reading throughout the summer and helps prevent the learning loss that can occur when school is out. The incentive prizes make reading fun and rewarding, while our teen volunteers help create a welcoming environment by listening to younger children talk about the books they have read. These interactions celebrate reading, build connections between children and teens, and make the library a place where young readers feel valued and encouraged.”

The Library of the Chathams Summer Reading Program is well designed and has hundreds of kids coming back year after year. School visits by our children’s staff, a kickoff event, spirited reading teams, a points program with easy‑to‑meet milestones, prizes, friendly faces, and an end‑of‑summer picnic to celebrate it all are just some of the highlights.

With just a little bit of structure, children are motivated to read during the summer and avoid losing the precious skills they worked hard to build during the school year. The fun is not just for kids, there is a teen and adult program as well.

The Library of the Chathams has dedicated resources to support these efforts: two Summer Reading Club Assistants, college students Molly Egan and Anaiah Lamont, are available any time the library is open to listen to book reports and record prize-winning points.

Registration for the Summer Reading Club begins on Monday, June 22 and be sure to join us at 6 pm that evening for the kickoff event featuring a family-friendly (ages 4 & up) Liberty Science Stage Show with cool experiments and some crowd participation. Read more about this and other events, here: chathamlibrary.org.

We are grateful for the generosity of our supporters, whose contributions make this program possible. The kickoff event is sponsored by the Marlee and Carl Frahn Fund for the Library of the Chathams of the Community Foundation of NJ, The Friends of the Library of the Chathams help provide prizes, the Jaycees provide funding for the end-of-summer picnic entertainment and the Kiwanis Club of Chatham and Madison provide and serve the food.