Category: Summer Reading Programs

What can a Summer Reading Program do for your child?

Posted on by Nick Terry

Summer Reading Program 2024: Super Early Bird Special – Ends April 2nd at midnight. Sign Up

Flowers are blooming, days are getting longer and warmer, and summer is right around the corner. It might be time to start thinking about summer plans for your kids.

As much as we may think learning loss from COVID is over, many kids in grades 4th-8th are still behind. During this time, there has been a widening gap between students. High-income families were able to rely on private tutors during this time, whereas the rest of the students weren’t so lucky. (January 2024: The First Year of Pandemic Recovery: A District-Level Analysis)

The good news is that summer is the perfect time to help your kids improve their skills.

What Should a Summer Reading Program Include?

You might have heard the phrase lately known as The Science of Reading.

Well, what is The Science of Reading?

The Science of Reading is a systematic research-based way to teach all kids to read whether they have learning challenges or not. It is the most efficient way to teach kids how to read and to improve their reading skills. Unfortunately, not all teachers and school districts teach kids this way, but the good news is that you can make sure your kids learn these principles over the summer.

When you teach kids to read or improve their reading skills with The Science of Reading, you turn kids who HATE reading into kids who devour books and have newfound confidence.

So, what exactly is The Science of Reading composed of?

The Five Tenets of Reading (The Science of Reading):

What are each of these five tenets of reading?

  • Phonemic Awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual sounds – phonemes – in spoken words.
  • Phonics uses the awareness of sounds and matches the sounds to the letter symbols.
  • Fluency is the ability to retrieve words effortlessly.
  • Vocabulary is the group of words you know and use effectively.
  • Comprehension is the ability to understand, analyze, synthesize, and use what you have read.

Okay, great. I know what The Science of Reading is now, but what do I do with my kids over the summer?

Ahhh, the paradox of choice. What you choose will depend on your budget, time you have available, and how much you and your kids want to improve their skills.

  1. Hire a private tutor
    Tutors can often cost an arm and a leg and can help with tailored one-on-one instruction. Depending on the tutor’s experience, they may or may not be experts at teaching reading and spelling with the science of reading. Unfortunately, they may turn out to be more expensive babysitters.
    Cost: $40-150/hr
  2. In-person or virtual 5-week classes
    These programs meet once a week for an hour and a half for five weeks live or on Zoom. These programs cost $350+ and often don’t improve kids’ reading skills as much as parents would like.
    Cost: $350+ per student
  3. Library summer programs
    These are great budget-friendly solutions. They often include a list of books for students to read and have meetings once a week or every other week. While there isn’t much focus on improving all the areas of reading (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary), they do encourage kids to read, and something is better than nothing.
    Most of the time, library programs figure out that kids already know how to read, but they don’t often help kids who hate reading or are struggling.
    Cost: Free
  4. Scholar Within’s Summer Reading Program
    This program is rooted in the science of reading, plus it includes spelling and phonics video lessons, brain-body activities, executive function activities, card games, and more that get the whole family involved. This is a self-paced program that you can do at home on your schedule. A print material box (available separately) goes with the program’s online portion.

    This program is perfect for kids who struggle with reading, hate reading, have dyslexia, auditory processing issues, or have other learning difficulties. It was designed by board-certified educational therapist Bonnie Terry, M.Ed., BCET.

    This program does require some parent involvement. If you just want to sit your child in front of a computer, this is likely not the program for you. Grades K-3: Most of the activities are done together with the parent and child. Grades 4-8: A couple of activities are done with the parent and child together, and the rest the child can do independently.

    Cost: $97 $77 for 6 Weeks + $49 print material box (Limited time super early bird pricing)

A summer reading program can make the difference in your child’s future success. What if your child could make a 30% jump in their reading skills? What about 40 or 50%? With the right summer activities your child can drastically improve their skills and have a newfound confidence in the fall.

We might be biased, but we believe our summer program is the world’s best summer reading program for improving your kids reading skills over the summer.

Whether you choose Scholar Within’s program this summer or go another route, be sure to take the effort towards improving learning skills over the summer to prevent learning loss and to help build your child’s confidence when it comes to school.

Scholar Within’s Summer Reading Program Includes:

  • Weekly Reading Selections
  • Reading Comprehension Questions
  • Reading Fluency Training Drills
  • Phonics and Spelling Video Lessons
  • Spelling Worksheets and Puzzles
  • Note-Taking Printables
  • Executive Function Activities
  • Brain-Body Activities
  • Card Games
  • Daily Emails
  • And More!

The program is a holistic approach to improving learning reading skills. By incorporating more than just the five tenets of reading, greater progress can be made.

Learn more about the program

What Parents Say About Scholar Within’s Summer Reading Program for Struggling Readers

Jennifer K. says:

“I started using this program after a TON of research. I needed a good fit for my 8 yr old dyslexic daughter. I’d say she 1.5-2 reading grades behind.

We tried the summer program and loved it.

This program was very simple and easy to acclimate to, which was a blessing bc these days I don’t have the time and energy to deep dive learning new programs. Scholar Within was instantly engaging and with the easy to follow step by step layout it made everything so approachable. I had to reach out through chat a few times and always received responses quickly and they were kind, helpful, and encouraging. 5 star customer service! I like how you can change the levels within the program (I started lower so that I could build her confidence) and the variety within lessons.

You might see that some are saying there’s a lot of printing, I was at first concerned about this but it really wasn’t bad. I’d just print a few lessons ahead of time and keep them in the folder. It was actually pretty easy and only took 1-2 minutes. They also have an option for some of the weeks to buy pre-printed materials. Do what works for you 🙂 My daughter said she really liked the games too.”

One component of the Summer Reading Program made a big difference for Brenda Prince. She says:

“I’ve been using the program with my ten-year-old special needs son who is reading below grade level and I can say that there has been a vast improvement as to his performance on each drill, both in his mastery of reading the words on the list as well as the number of words he reads each time. For example, his first attempt at Drill One which consists of Consonant-Vowel-Consonant words with the short a sound, he read eighteen words in the minute time frame but missed seven of those words. Over a period of three weeks, he was able to increase his speed to one hundred and eight words per minute and correctly pronouncing all of those words. When we moved on to subsequent drills, I noticed that he did much better, even on his first attempt at reading the word list.”

Janine Franks says:

“Thanks so much for the help you have given us. One of my sons was quite dyslexic in reading but after using your system, I rarely notice any sign of it. He actually enjoys reading now. He´s read Narnia on his own!”

Scholar Within and Bonnie Terry’s Summer Reading Program can be perfect for readers of all levels, whether they are at, above, or below reading proficiency for their grade level. It not only incorporates the five tenets of reading, but it focuses on improving the processes of how people learn. When your areas of visual, auditory, and tactile/kinesthetic perception are working as well as possible, it makes learning and reading easier for you.

This program also benefits those with dyslexia, ADHD, learning disabilities, or other reading struggles. It is specifically designed to help those that are either behind in reading, struggle with reading, or just want to boost their reading skills.

Learn more about the Summer Reading Program here.

Be sure to sign up for the program.

Who Is Bonnie Terry?

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET is the author of Five Minutes To Better Reading Skills, Ten Minutes To Better Study Skills and numerous other books, reading games, and guides. She is a Board Certified Educational Therapist and internationally recognized as America’s Leading Learning Specialist and the founder of BonnieTerryLearning.com. Terry is an expert in identifying students’ learning disabilities. Ms. Terry shows teachers and parents how can give their child a 2 to 4-year learning advantage in just 45-60 minutes a day. She is a frequent media guest and speaker.

Vocabulary and Comprehension: How Are They Connected?

Posted on by Bonnie Terry

There is a direct correlation between vocabulary and comprehension. If you don’t understand a word, how it is used, what it is related to, you don’t comprehend it. Comprehension is the ability to understand, analyze, synthesize, and use what you have read, heard, or seen. Words, otherwise known as vocabulary, are in everything: what you read, what you speak, what you listen to. Words are everywhere. So, to improve comprehension, we need to improve the vocabulary we use.

Vocabulary is often described as the knowledge-base of words and their meanings. This is the ‘go-to place’ in the memory system of the brain where comprehension takes place. We take in a word, process it, make associations with it, and file it into long-term memory. Once it is in long-term memory, it can be retrieved and used.

If you don’t have a large vocabulary to draw upon, comprehension becomes difficult. In fact, “lacking either adequate word identification skills or adequate vocabulary will ensure failure” (Biemiller, 2005). The Nation’s Report Card states, “Students who scored high in comprehension also scored high on vocabulary.” So, improving one improves the other. The more words you know (understand and can use appropriately), the better you comprehend.

How To Improve Vocabulary and Comprehension

Research states that vocabulary needs to be taught in a variety of ways for students to be able to use the words they learn at a later time.

  1. Direct instruction
  2. Repetition and multiple exposures
  3. Words must be useful so they can be used in multiple contexts

Apply the Research on Vocabulary and Comprehension

Teach new vocabulary:

  1. Use a story to model what the word means.
  2. Use the new word into a story or example that they have made up.
  3. Draw a picture or doodle a picture of what the words mean.
  4. Write the new word in a vocabulary notebook, keep your story example and picture with it.
  5. Engage in conversations using the new word every day for 5-10 days.
  6. Play games with the words.

The Summer Reading Program provides a variety of ways to improve vocabulary and thereby comprehension skills. Two specific activities are to draw a picture or doodle about what you read and playing the weekly card game. The card games rotate from word structure games that build vocabulary to specific vocabulary games that build word associations. Students learn and practice vocabulary in a relaxed game setting.  Eric Jensen, author of Brain-Based Learning, (1997) states, “Through visual and kinesthetic methods you’ll increase student performance.” Games do just that!

Learn More

Who is Bonnie Terry?

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET is the author of Five Minutes To Better Reading Skills, Ten Minutes To Better Study Skills and numerous others books, reading games, and guides and the Awaken the Scholar Within Programs. She is a Board Certified Educational Therapist and internationally recognized as America’s Leading Learning Specialist and the founder of BonnieTerryLearning.com. Terry is an expert in identifying students’ learning disabilities. Ms. Terry coaches teachers and parents so they can give their child a 2 to 4-year learning advantage in just 45-60 minutes a day. She is a frequent media guest and speaker.

How Executive Function Skills Impact Reading

Posted on by Bonnie Terry

What are Executive Function Skills?

Executive function skills are part of our daily lives. These are the planning, organizing, and prioritizing skills that help you start a task and stay focused on it until completion. From doing your homework to planning a family vacation to building a sand castle, these skills are critical.

We don’t often think of the connection executive functions skills have with reading, but these skills also impact reading.

How Executive Function Impacts Reading

Any time you read:

  • You decide what you are going to read.
  • You decide when you are going to read.
  • You plan your reading to fit it into your day.

As you read a news story, an article, or a book, you constantly are using your executive functions skills by asking yourself:

  • Is this important?
  • Do I need to remember this?
  • What associations can I draw to the characters?
  • Do I have any personal life experiences that are relatable?

As you ask yourself questions about what you are reading as you are reading, it helps you retain, understand, and fully comprehend what you read. This is actually a component of executive function.

What reading processes are affected by executive function?

Your working memory and mental flexibility are activated by your executive function skills (asking yourself these questions, planning, and organizing your thoughts). Once you are able to organize your thoughts with your working memory and flexibility, you are able to act succinctly.

  • Vocabulary: helps you organize and categorize words to retain meaning
  • Grammar: helps you interpret content (the nuances and subtleties of the English language, for example: whether a group of words is a statement or a question)
  • Word and sentence emphasis: what words and sentences are important to gather meaning from (what type of mood or emotional context does the passage convey)

Executive function skills and working memory come into every aspect of reading. This includes retrieving word meaning and integrating that with prior knowledge and experience.

Your ability to maintain focus impacts your ability to read easily. Working memory comes into play by helping us to hold onto multiple bits of information in a paragraph as well as a story.

Executive Function Skills Build Foundational Reading Skills

Research by Laurie Cutting and George McCloskey has established the contributions of executive function to the reading process. Executive function skills work directly with working memory. If you improve your executive function skills, your reading comprehension skills will naturally improve. There are specific activities for different age groups that strengthen executive function and reading skills.

Summer Reading Program 2019

Summer Reading Program Includes Executive Function Activities

We included executive function activities in our Summer Reading Program because of this direct connection. As executive function skills improve, reading skills improve.

The Summer Reading Program is for entering kindergarteners through 8th graders. Every student can improve their reading skills.

Learn more about our Summer Reading Program here.

Who is Bonnie Terry?

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET is the author of Five Minutes To Better Reading Skills, Ten Minutes To Better Study Skills and numerous others books, reading games, and guides. She is a Board Certified Educational Therapist and internationally recognized as America’s Leading Learning Specialist and the founder of BonnieTerryLearning.com. Terry is an expert in identifying students’ learning disabilities. Ms. Terry coaches teachers and parents so they can give their child a 2 to 4-year learning advantage in just 45-60 minutes a day. She is a frequent media guest and speaker.

Phonemic Awareness: What is it? How does it relate to reading?

Posted on by Bonnie Terry

Summer Reading Program: Enrollment is open. Sign Up

Phonemic awareness combines the auditory and visual components of reading. It is the ability to understand sound-structure. When we receive information through our senses, seeing, hearing, and doing, we use phonemic awareness to recognize words, phrases, and sentences. It is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate sounds. When we typically hear or read a word or a word part, we don’t often think in terms of the different sounds that are combined to make the word. Building these recognition skills of the sounds and components that make up words directly improves reading skills. Phonemic awareness is one of the five tenets of reading.

Components of Phonemic Awareness

Phoneme blending: Children listen to a sequence of separately spoken phonemes and then combine the phonemes to form a word. /d/ /o/ /g/ is dog. (This is the process used in decoding words.)

Phoneme segmentation: Children break a spoken word into its separate phonemes. There are four sounds in truck: /t/ /r/ /u/ /k/. (This is the process used in spelling words phonetically: “invented spelling.”)

Phoneme/Grapheme Correspondence: This is the sound/symbol relationship which also deals with visual memory. You teach which sounds are represented by which letter(s), and how to blend those letters into single-syllable words and then multi-syllable words.

Phonemic awareness instruction can help beginning and more advanced readers alike.

When You Improve Phonemic Awareness, You Inherently Improve Your Spelling, Reading, and Even Note-Taking

Phonemic awareness is one of the foundational pieces of reading. Bridging phonemic awareness with phonics is your ability to use that awareness and match the sounds to the symbols. These are two pieces of the five tenets of reading. Combining and improving your phonemic awareness and phonics also improves your ability to listen effectively and even take notes from a lecture.

The Five Tenets of Reading

  • Phonemic Awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual sounds – phonemes – in spoken words.
  • Phonics is using the awareness of sounds and matching the sounds to the letter symbols.
  • Fluency is the ability to retrieve words effortlessly.
  • Vocabulary is the group of words you know and use effectively.
  • Comprehension is the ability to understand, analyze, synthesize, and use what you have read.

Phonics: More than matching the sounds with the symbols!

If students know the structure of how we put letters together to make words, the spelling (vowel) patterns, they can spell thousands of words. Your ability to see the patterns within words helps them to not only know what they are they are looking at but also know what sound the vowels will make. Conversely, when they hear a vowel sound, they’ll know how the syllable must be spelled to make that sound.

Playing with words, individual components of words as well as the vocabulary (meaning) of words expand a student’s ability to read, comprehend, and spell unfamiliar words. Our Summer Reading Program uses these specific strategies to improve reading skills effectively.

Areas of Auditory Processing

Who is Bonnie Terry?

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET is the author of Five Minutes To Better Reading Skills, Ten Minutes To Better Study Skills and numerous others books, reading games, and guides and the Awaken the Scholar Within Programs. She is a Board Certified Educational Therapist and internationally recognized as America’s Leading Learning Specialist and the founder of BonnieTerryLearning.com. Terry is an expert in identifying students’ learning disabilities. Ms. Terry coaches teachers and parents so they can give their child a 2 to 4-year learning advantage in just 45-60 minutes a day. She is a frequent media guest and speaker.

4 Steps to Prevent the Summer Slide (Learning Loss)

Posted on by Bonnie Terry

Wait, you want to prevent the summer slide, slip-n-slide? No, not that type of slide. We like that type of slide! We’re talking about the learning loss that kids often experience by not being in school over the summer. This is commonly referred to as the summer slide.

Summer break is upon us. This is your time to make a choice for your child: make a difference in their reading experience or fall behind with the summer slide? Children can lose between two and four months of learning over the summer. Children that struggle can lose between four and six months of learning.

You can make a difference to not only prevent the summer slide but also improve your child’s skills. You can even have fun while helping your child improve their skills. They can improve their skills in as little as 30-60 minutes a day, so they can still have tons of free time.

Step 1 to Prevent the Summer Slide: Plan Your Days, Weeks, and Months

I know that planning might sound like a strange summer activity, but it is really important. I’m sure you’ve all heard the statement, “fail to plan, plan to fail.” This applies very aptly to what are you going to do over the summer to ensure your children don’t succumb to the summer slide. However, more importantly, this applies to your child’s ability to be a part of the planning process. Children don’t automatically wake up one day as they get older and know how to plan their priorities as well as their day.

During the school year, so much of a child’s life is planned for them, from the moment they get up, to going to school, to after-school activities, and then bedtime. Teaching planning skills and being part of the planning process over the summer is one of the first chances they really get to be involved in planning.

When you have a stake in the plan, in what you are doing for the day, week, month, or field trip activity helps you to also give you a sense of belonging and self-worth. So, this is why planning and executive function activities are part of our 2019 Summer Reading Program. This gives children a chance to experience and carry out planning in a non-stressful way. Additionally, the planning process actually does improve reading skills.

Step 2 to Prevent the Summer Slide: Take Family Field Trips

Plan family field trips or adventures on Fridays or over the weekend. Rally together as a family and decide where you want to go. Let everyone speak up and ask even the youngest for their ideas. You don’t have to go far on your trips. Open up a map or search Google to find different parks, businesses, or museums that you haven’t been. This research phase can be a great part of the process of discovering where you want to go. Open up a calendar and plan out what days you can go where.

Then, to help your kids retain the wonderful experiences they are having, it is important to help them to process the activity. An easy way to do that is to have them write simple summary paragraphs about where you went and what they liked or didn’t like about the excursion. It is great to use fill-in-the-blank graphic organizers to help them with this. We have specially designed graphic organizers in our summer reading program.

Taking the important step of processing what they have done in a written format increases your children’s ability to make multiple connections with the activity. This increases comprehension in a multiple of ways. This will also give your children an enlarged memory bank of background knowledge to bring to any reading activity they do in the future.

Step 3 to Prevent the Summer Slide: Improve Reading Skills

summer slide reading fluencyOne of the most important things you can do to boost reading skills is to improve reading fluency. In our summer reading program, you will get our specially designed reading drills to improve your reading speed and accuracy. This part of the program just takes 5 minutes a day. Daily, short fluency training can make a huge difference in improving reading skills over the summer.

Learn about the 2019 Summer Reading Program

Step 4 to Prevent the Summer Slide: Enroll in the Summer Reading Program

We provide the framework, the overarching summer weekly schedule and even teach your kids how to plan their free time. Then we provide the video and audio lessons, reading material, and fun activities so your kids have a little bit of content work and then have the rest of the day to do whatever they want to.

The 6-Week Summer Reading Program includes:

  • Reading Fluency
  • Spelling
  • Comprehension
  • Phonics
  • Executive Function
  • Brain Balance Body Connection Activities
  • Video and Audio Lessons
  • Weekly Schedule
  • Easy Online Access
  • Help and Support

The difference is amazing. Sign up for our Summer Reading Program.

Who is Bonnie Terry?

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET is the author of Five Minutes To Better Reading Skills, Ten Minutes To Better Study Skills and numerous other books, reading games, and guide. She is a Board Certified Educational Therapist and internationally recognized as America’s Leading Learning Specialist and the founder of BonnieTerryLearning.com. Terry is an expert in identifying students’ learning disabilities. Ms. Terry coaches teachers and parents so they can give their child a 2 to 4-year learning advantage in just 45-60 minutes a day. She is a frequent media guest and speaker.

Spelling and Reading: How are they Connected?

Posted on by Bonnie Terry

Summer Reading Program: Enrollment is open. Sign Up

Spelling and reading are mirror sides of each other. Spelling is the encoding of words, putting letters together to make words. Whereas reading is the decoding of words, interpreting words. These sides work hand in hand. In order to spell a word, you need to pull the word apart, a sound, pattern, or syllable at a time and retrieve the letters that represent those sounds, patterns, and syllables. You then either write them down or say them. The auditory, visual and tactile/kinesthetic memory systems are involved in this process. Think about it, how many times have you spelled a word out-loud and then write it down to double-check your spelling?

Researchers Brenda Rapp and Kate Lipka state, “We find clear evidence of shared substrates for reading and spelling. The results specifically provide strong support for a shared lexical orthographic function in reading and spelling in the left mid-fusiform region.” In other words, there are specific shared areas of the brain that build links between the visual forms and auditory forms of whole words.  Further studies by (Shahar-Yames and Share, 2008; Ouellette, 2010) conclude that practice writing your words brings an advantage to the long-term encoding-retrieval match (memory system retrieving the spelling of words).

So, how do you develop and improve both spelling and reading skills?

Spelling and reading need to be taught in an explicit manner made up of phonics instruction, the structural analysis including prefixes, suffixes, and root words, and comprehension strategies. You also can be taught to increase your rate of rapidly naming objects with specific exercises designed specifically with that in mind. However, you do not want to only do that. Any skill taught in isolation remains that, an improved skill in isolation, unless you make the bridge to bring the skill from the isolated practice to real-life practice.

With spelling, you need to be taught in an explicit manner the sounds of the words and how to pull them together to make words. This is part of phonics and structural analysis referred to in the above paragraph. Our Summer Reading Program teaches the sounds of the letters, how to put the sounds together to make words, and the several of the 8 structural vowel patterns in the English language. This addresses both encoding and decoding of words. This helps to cement, so to speak, your ability to both encode and decode thousands of words. Additionally, since best practices say these skills should not be taught in isolation, we work on the fluency of decoding words through the fluency portion of the program and comprehension through additional written techniques and games.

Who is Bonnie Terry?

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET is the author of Five Minutes To Better Reading Skills, Ten Minutes To Better Study Skills, and numerous other books, reading games, and guides. She is a Board Certified Educational Therapist and internationally recognized as America’s Leading Learning Specialist and the founder of BonnieTerryLearning.com. Terry is an expert in identifying students’ learning disabilities. Ms. Terry coaches teachers and parents so they can give their child a 2 to 4-year learning advantage in just 45-60 minutes a day. She is a frequent media guest and speaker.

6 Benefits of Summer Reading Programs

Posted on by Bonnie Terry

Enrollment is open for Summer Reading Program 2019 (Grades K-8).

Benefits of summer reading programs are well documented. In fact, summer reading programs have been around for more than a century, and they continue on because of their great benefits. Summer reading programs come in all shapes and sizes from online reading and answering questions to reading library books, to 4-hour per day programs, to online-delivery family participation programs that build family time fun activities into the program.

The 6 Benefits of Summer Reading Programs

  • Improve Reading Skills
  • Increase Desire to Read
  • Improve Self-Esteem
  • Neutralize Summer Learning Loss
  • Improve Comprehension
  • Improve Memory Skills

Overall, summer reading programs really do improve kids’ reading skills and increase their desire to read. Additionally, according to the School Library Journal, those who participate not only mitigate any summer learning loss, but they even show gains. Most kids develop an interest in reading, improve their comprehension, and further develop their memory skills. Reading content material even becomes more interesting.

Reserve your spot for Summer Reading Program 2019 (Grades K-8: Online).

Questions to Ask Yourself When Looking for the Best Benefits of Summer Reading Program

Are the five tenets of reading included?

  • Phonemic Awareness
  • Phonics
  • Fluency
  • Vocabulary
  • Comprehension

Is the Summer Reading Program Flexible?

  • Can you work the summer reading program on your time frame or are you tied to specific times of day?
  • Do you need to travel to the program?
  • Does the program offer a variety of reading activities including games or is it just reading and answering questions?
  • Is the program labor intensive?

Is the program based on your child’s reading level or on their grade level?

  • If your child is above grade level, can you start them there, or do they need to do their grade level activities?
  • If your child is below grade level or way below grade level, can you start them at their current level and level up from there?

Bonnie Terry’s Summer Reading Program allows kids to be kids and gives them the foundational skills in a holistic approach. This online-delivered program is one where families work together and play together as they improve their reading skills not just in school, but in life.

Learn more about Bonnie Terry’s Summer Reading Program.

Summer Reading Program 2019 - Reserve Online
Learn more about the program at SummerReading.net

Who is Bonnie Terry?

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET is the author of Five Minutes To Better Reading Skills, Ten Minutes To Better Study Skills and numerous other books, reading games, and guides. She is a Board Certified Educational Therapist and internationally recognized as America’s Leading Learning Specialist and the founder of BonnieTerryLearning.com. Terry is an expert in identifying students’ learning disabilities. Ms. Terry coaches teachers and parents so they can give their child a 2 to 4-year learning advantage in just 45-60 minutes a day. She is a frequent media guest and speaker.

8 Family Activities for the 4th of July

Posted on by Bonnie Terry

July 4th is the perfect time for family activities like a picnic or BBQ. While the family is together, be sure to play a few games. You can do relay races, an obstacle course, or even a water balloon toss. Relay races and obstacle courses actually improve several areas of learning including auditory memory, visual memory, laterality, and directionality. These activities all work on the brain-body connection which is critical to learning.

Brain-body activities such as relay races, obstacle courses, or playing musical chairs are typical movement activities that are fun for kids of all ages and are done in just a few minutes. Additional activities can be as simple as playing freeze tag or tossing bean bags at a target. The sensory systems in our brain are all interconnected and when we develop them in different ways, it also helps improve our academic skills.

Family Activities Improve Learning Skills: Relay Races Improve Areas of Perception and the Brain-Body Connection

Wheelbarrow Race

  • Pair kids in teams of two and mark off the start and finish lines. One player in each team must walk on his hands while his partner holds his ankles. Together they go as fast as they can to the finish line, then switch places and race back to start.

Egg on a Spoon Race

  • Form two teams. Give every player a spoon. Give each team a hard-boiled egg (or a plastic one). To play, teams carry their egg from the starting line to a turnaround point and back again, then pass it to a teammate to repeat the process. If the egg is dropped, the player must stop and retrieve it. Whichever team gets the egg back and forth the fastest wins.
  • Variations: Use a raw egg; skip the spoon and use an armload of plastic eggs; skip the egg and use a bowl full of pennies that must be transferred on the spoon; add obstacles to the playing area; require players to march or skip instead of walking

Balloon Race

  • These races are best for kids over 4. Littler ones may be scared by popping noises, and fragments of popped balloons are a choking hazard. Split the group into teams and have them stand in a single-file line. Give the leader of each line a balloon. He must pass it through his legs to the player behind him. That player passes it overhead to the next player. Repeat this pattern until the balloon gets to the end of the line; the last player runs to the front of the line and (optional!) pops the balloon to win the game.
  • Variations: Use water balloons or a beach ball; have kids race from start to finish lines holding a balloon between their knees or back-to-back with a partner, or, in pairs, balancing a balloon on a towel or piece of newspaper.

3-legged Race

  • Divide players into teams of two. Have them stand side-by-side and tie adjacent (inside) legs together using a bandanna or scarf. Mark off the start and finish lines. The three-legged pairs must work together to race to the finish. It’s harder than it looks!
  • Variation: Have duos link arms instead. To make this tougher, give them something they must carry together, such as a football or a small bucket of water.

Potato Sack Race Outside

Water Relay Races

  • Give each team a plastic cup and a bucket full of water. Put one empty bucket for each team at the finish line. Players must take turns filling up their cup from their bucket, then dumping it into their empty bucket. The game is over when the once-full bucket is empty; the team with the most amount of water in their finish-line bucket wins.
  • Variations: Use a large sponge instead of a cup; poke a few holes in the cup and make kids carry it over their heads

Dress-Up Relay

  • Divide your group into two teams. Place two similar piles, boxes, or suitcases of dress-up items at the end of the playing area, one per team. The first player runs to the pile, puts on all the dress-ups on top of her clothing, then runs back to her team. She removes all the dress-up items and gives them to the next player, who must put them all on, run back and forth across playing area, and then remove the dress-ups so the next player can repeat the process. Variations: Have the first player put on just one item from the pile. The second player has to put on that item, plus a second one. The third player puts on three items, and so on.

Be sure to take pictures too!

Fireworks Family Activities Improve Learning Skills

Get the most out of your trip to view the fireworks. Be extra observant. Count how may blue, green, red, white, and multi-colored fireworks there are. You can even make a chart for this. Decide which colors were your favorite ones. Was there a style that you liked better than another? This will help you with your observation skills. Be sure to take pictures throughout the day.

People watch. Look at the different kinds of people that come to view the fireworks. Bring a few sheets of paper with you so you can keep track of how many little children? How many do you think were school-age? How many teens? How many adults? How many people were dressed in red, white, and blue? Kids can also compare their counts with their siblings. Did you each get the same amount? If not, why do you think your counts were different?

Stretch Activity: Scrapbook / July 4th in Review

Afterward, on July 5th, put your pictures together with a quick summary of your day using graphic organizers from the Summer Reading Program. Then, 3-hole punch your summary and keep it in a family notebook. At the end of the summer, you’ll have a great family memory book as well!

Summer Reading Program Family Activities

Family outings and activities are built into the Summer Reading Program. This is one of the ways we build memory skills in addition to having a good time with your family. The activities improve your overall experience bank from which to draw upon while reading. This is your factual knowledge base, another piece of the comprehension puzzle. Take pictures or draw pictures of your family activity. Place them with a few sentences about the activity into your family memory book. Then, go through the family memory book and talk about the great times you had. Doing this will improve writing skills and both auditory and visual memory skills as well as 15 other areas of learning too!

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Who is Bonnie Terry?

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET is the author of Five Minutes To Better Reading Skills, Ten Minutes To Better Study Skills and numerous others books, reading games, and guides and the Awaken the Scholar Within Programs. She is a Board Certified Educational Therapist and internationally recognized as America’s Leading Learning Specialist and the founder of BonnieTerryLearning.com. Terry is an expert in identifying students’ learning disabilities. Ms. Terry coaches teachers and parents so they can give their child a 2 to 4-year learning advantage in just 45-60 minutes a day. She is a frequent media guest and speaker.

Outsmart Summer School with Online Summer Reading Program

Posted on by Bonnie Terry

Registration is now open for the world’s first parent-friendly online summer reading program. The program includes the five principles of reading (phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension) plus brain-body and executive function skills. Designed by learning expert Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET., the program is six-weeks long and takes 45 to 60 minutes a day.

This unique summer reading program allows parents to fit the activities into their schedule at home. It is accessible online with instructional videos to watch and worksheets to print out. The actual activities, however, are done offline at a table or outside.

“We love your program because we have five solid years of data supporting your work,” says the author of School Moves for Learning, Debra Wilson.

Terry’s program https://SummerReading.net/ typically shows three-to-six-month reading level gains in just six weeks. Some families even see results upwards of 50% to 75% gains in reading fluency and comprehension. Terry states this occurs because the program “incorporates the five principles of reading along with brain-body and executive function activities along with reading and vocabulary games using visual, auditory, and kinesthetic methods.”

Terry is releasing this summer reading program because the average reading scores of fourth and eighth graders have not significantly improved since 2013. According to the Nation’s Report Card, as of 2015, 64% of fourth graders and 66% of eighth graders are below proficient in reading. Terry states, “Ninety-five percent of reading problems are related to visual tracking problems, which are not tested for in most schools.”

Bonnie Terry’s Summer Reading Program Focuses on:

  1. Fluency training (reading accurately from left to right) for just 5 minutes a day improves foundational reading skills. It helps every child read not only at but above grade level. “Kids read across not down and need to master the art of eye tracking, just like a skilled athlete uses better eye-tracking skills to catch, throw and hit the ball,” she says.
  2. Listen, learn and do. Kids do not learn something until they act on it. Terry’s Summer Reading Program uses graphic organizers which show kids how to easily take notes on what they read. They learn how to turn those notes into summary paragraphs. “If ultimately we want to teach our kids to be good thinkers, we have to show them how to take action on what they learned,” says Terry. “Writing is the doing part of thinking.”
  3. Play games and have fun. Games establish an emotional connection with reading and writing, because they help you find main ideas, details, and how to write good sentences, and improve vocabulary.

Vocabulary Card Game

Regina Adams says, “We love the variety of activities. They have really made a difference in my children’s reading skills. Your program helps build their self-esteem. The activities included are short and quick.”

Learn More

Who is Bonnie Terry?

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET is the author of Five Minutes To Better Reading Skills, Ten Minutes To Better Study Skills and numerous others books, reading games, and guides and the Awaken the Scholar Within Programs. She is a Board Certified Educational Therapist and internationally recognized as America’s Leading Learning Specialist and the founder of BonnieTerryLearning.com. Terry is an expert in identifying students’ learning disabilities. Ms. Terry coaches teachers and parents so they can give their child a 2 to 4-year learning advantage in just 45-60 minutes a day. She is a frequent media guest and speaker.

Rapid Naming: What is it? How does it Impact Reading?

Posted on by Bonnie Terry

Rapid naming, often referred to as RAN (Rapid Automatized Naming), is critical to reading skills. It is the aspect of phonologic processing that allows a person to automatically retrieve the names and sounds of letters, symbols, words, word chunks, sentences, and rhymes in a quick and effortless manner.

This ability to retrieve stored information rapidly is directly related to the type of process that one goes through when they are reading. I like to think of it in terms of being able to press the ‘easy button.’ In other words, it is so easy to bring information up it is like you don’t even have to think about it.

In order to make sense of the written word, a child or adult must be able to quickly access and retrieve stored phonemes and/or word or word chunks that are stored in memory.

Rapid Naming (Rapid Automatized Naming or RAN)

Rapid Naming directly correlates with processing speed. When you are able to improve your visual processing speed, you inherently improve your reading skills. If it takes you less time to be able to recognize a shape, letter, or word, you are able to read faster. If it takes you less time to do this, it also means that it takes less effort.

Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) has been researched for close to three decades. The Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) Test demonstrates that the majority of children and adults with reading difficulties have problems with rapid naming. In fact, they are slower to process even most familiar symbols and stimuli in the language: letters, numbers, colors, and similar objects.

Snyder and Downey (1995) report from the Denver Reading Study that the accuracy rates of those with reading difficulties and those with normal achieving readers were not significantly different. The only significant differences noted were reaction time and production duration; readers with reading difficulties had significantly longer reaction times and production durations.

Can You Improve Your Rapid Naming Skills?

You can use flash cards of different symbols, shapes, colors, letters, and numbers and have your kids say the name of the objects as you cycle through the cards. But, because we read from left to right, the best way to practice rapid naming is to have shapes, letters, numbers and/or symbols listed from left to right. This activity also helps improve reading fluency and visual tracking skills.

Announcing Rapid Naming Drills in Our Summer Reading Program

We have just added rapid naming drills to our Summer Reading Program. These drills focus on simple symbols to call upon and to scan from left to right to work on your ability to automatically interpret the symbol as well as to work on your visual processing and tracking skills. This is just one part of our holistic approach to improving reading skills. Additionally, we also have included specific reading fluency drills. Registration is now open.

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Who is Bonnie Terry?

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET is the author of Five Minutes To Better Reading Skills, Ten Minutes To Better Study Skills and numerous others books, reading games, and guides and is the CEO of Scholar Within, Inc. She is a Board Certified Educational Therapist and internationally recognized as America’s Leading Learning Specialist and the founder of BonnieTerryLearning.com. Terry is an expert in identifying students’ learning disabilities. Ms. Terry coaches teachers and parents so they can give their child a 2 to 4-year learning advantage in just 45-60 minutes a day. She is a frequent media guest and speaker.

The Brain-Body Connection and the Vestibular System: How does it relate to Reading?

Posted on by Bonnie Terry

The brain and body work together as a machine. This machine is designed to move through space efficiently. Vision is involved with walking and maintaining balance. Additionally, arms and legs swing, counterbalancing each other. The hips and buttocks stabilize the body. A person with good vision can see and read a sign that is 20 feet away while walking. The eye needs to be very stable in space. Together, the neck and vestibular system stabilize and refine the head and vision system.

The brain-body connection and the vestibular system are central to learning and processing information. The vestibular system is the sensory system that is the lead contributor to your sense of balance and spatial orientation. This system sends signals to the neural structures that control eye movement. The vestibular system helps us to focus our perception of objects and words. This is the system that helps us interact with the environment.

New neural connections are created whenever we throw or catch a ball, ride a bike, or even learn to read. When you input new information through your senses, your brain interprets this information and forms new connections. This is the work of the higher brain, the part of the brain that allows us to sense and understand the world around us.

During the process of walking, the vestibular system is activated. Your ability to control your body’s movement happens with your nervous system, spinal cord, brain stem, cortex, reticular system, and the limbic system working together. Information is passed up and down the body through the spinal cord. When the specific actions are executed, the tactile, auditory, motor, and visual systems sense the actions. Once the actions are completed, the cortex processes the information and performs higher-order thinking from the information generated during the activity. The cortex provides feedback as well as updates the memory banks.

This is why the vestibular system is considered the entryway to the brain and is said to have the most important influence on everyday functioning. The vestibular system is “the unifying system that directly or indirectly influences nearly everything we do,” (Hannaford, 1995, p. 38).

How Are Reading Activities Impacted by the Brain-Body Connection?

So, the vestibular system is important to higher-order thinking, receiving and interpreting data. Think about this for a minute. We receive information from taste, smell, seeing, hearing, and doing (tactile/kinesthetic). Once we receive the information, the brain needs to interpret the data. So, when we receive input in terms of words, shapes, sizes, directions, and space, the vestibular system sifts through the information and helps to interpret it, sending it to specific areas of the brain to gain meaning.

Simply stated, the vestibular system and the brain-body connection directly impact your ability to receive and interpret information: words, sentences, paragraphs, stories. It allows us to see the shapes, sizes, and positions of letters in space. Additionally, this system helps you to visually scan words across a page to read fluently and accurately. Without the ability to scan words across a page quickly and accurately, reading is stilted and comprehension is lost. So, as we improve the vestibular system, the system of brain balance, reading improves.

Brain-Body Activities

Brain-body activities are typically movement activities that are fun for kids of all ages and are done in just a few minutes. Activities can be as simple as balancing on an exercise ball, doing a tree pose, or tossing bean bags. The sensory systems in our brain are all interconnected and when we develop them in different ways, it also helps improve our academic skills. Even NASA has done extensive research on how brain-body activities can impact our ability to learn. Our Summer Reading Program includes numerous brain balance activities to improve reading skills.

Who is Bonnie Terry?

Bonnie Terry is a Board Certified Educational Therapist and internationally recognized as America’s Leading Learning Specialist and the founder of BonnieTerryLearning.com. Terry is an expert in developing learning programs that target how people learn through the visual, auditory, and tactile/kinesthetic processing systems. Terry coaches teachers and parents so they can give their child a 2 to 4-year learning advantage in just 45-60 minutes a day. She is a frequent media guest and speaker.

Learn more about the Summer Reading Program

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