As educators and administrators across the country focus their efforts on improving students’ reading skills, many students show measurable success by the end of the school year. However, once the school year ends, a whole new challenge begins during the summer for ensuring that students retain the gains they have achieved in reading during the previous school year.

This summer, the Department of Education, The Arizona State Library, First Things First, the nonprofit organization, Read-on Arizona and MetaMetrics®, an educational measurement company and developer of The Lexile Framework for Reading have joined to promote a summer reading program for parents, educators, librarians, and children/students.

The Lexile Framework for Reading provides a common, developmental scale for matching reader ability and text difficulty. Lexile measures enable educators, parents and students to select targeted materials that can improve reading skills and to monitor reading growth across the curriculum, in the library and at home. Recognized as the most widely adopted reading measure, Lexile measures are part of reading and testing programs in the classroom and at the district and state levels.

The goal of this collaboration is to reduce summer reading slide for Arizona’s children/students. This partnership uses the public library’s annual summer reading program as a springboard to involve educators, students and parents in choosing summer reading materials based on interest and Lexile measures. The Summer Reading Program is to encourage Children and families to read throughout the summer so they’ll increase or maintain their reading levels they worked so hard to achieve.

For more information, go to Read On Arizona.