Ella Minnow Pea

Ella+Minnow+Pea

Josh Brester

As the school year comes to an end, students yearn for the days of summer, warm weather and no homework, with one exception: summer reading. The summer reading program is nothing new and has been a staple at Prep for a very long time.

Summer reading helps students keep up with vocabulary,encourages more reading and keeps the mind active, even when not in school. Some teachers feel this has been really effective, while others feel l that it is not the best way to keep kids literacy up.

Finding a book with good literacy and vocabulary isn’t always challenging for the English department, but choosing a book that students and teachers alike will be engaged with can prove difficult.

“Sometimes when students were kids, reading was really fun, but a lot of guys lose interest in reading for fun, or guys do enjoy reading and they just don’t talk about it a lot,” said Karri Martin. “So I hope this encourages kids to enjoy reading, or at least that it is OK to read.”

Although not all students may enjoy reading, teachers still feel it is important that they still read at least one book. Summer is a time where a lot of students tend to forget information, and lose some of the information they obtained from the past year.

“Your brain loses and grows, just as much as any other part of you,” said Martin. “So encouraging that [summer reading] is very important.”

Students are required to read the summer reading book, but in recent years have been able to find ways around this, by looking up online summaries. The teachers are aware of this, and it makes it all that harder for them to find a book that will actually get the students to read.

“The guys who like to read will read it, the guys who don’t, I don’t care what you give them, they aren’t going to read it,” said Mike Witt.