How a Summer on LightSail Can Counter COVID and the Summer Literacy Learning Loss

All students look forward to summer after a long school year. Of course, teachers do as well. Summer provides an opportunity for a much-needed vacation and plenty of time to “reset” yourself before the new school year begins. 

However, with this in mind, students entering the final week of the school year have two learning challenges currently working against them.

• COVID
• Summer Literacy Learning Loss

Most school districts had the threat of COVID affecting student learning this past year. Some of the schedule quite frequently was stop and go because of COVID outbreaks or the worries that the virus brought. Furthermore, much of the year for most students was completed remotely, and depending upon the instructor and the lesson plans in place, learning could have been greatly affected that way. 

Now, as students enter into the summer, the next few months off could produce the dreaded summer learning slide. Depending upon the research studies, this would involve students regressing back a couple of months or even half a school year in the knowledge they had previously gained if they are not actively learning during their time off from the classroom. 

With LightSail, All Is Not Lost

LightSail is a complete comprehensive literacy program available online that offers students thousands of available books and Lexile comprehension questions for the books to ensure they are actively reading and understanding the material appropriately. LightSail makes its program available during the summer months to school districts and their students in an effort to halt the summer literacy learning loss and keep students reading even while they are not in the classroom.  

A research study completed by Johns Hopkins University in 2015 demonstrated with just 30 minutes of reading on LightSail a day, students can maintain or even gain literacy skills during the summer months. Thus proving that with consistent use of LightSail, students can not only conquer the summer learning loss in reading, but also compensate for the learning problems that came with COVID. 

Don’t Forget the Lexile Aligned Vocabulary Questions

While reading the books on LightSail is important to maintain and gain literacy skills during the summer months, don’t forget to take the Lexile aligned quizzes afterward. This will  improve the student’s Lexile level and ensure they are understanding the text they are reading.