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Booking with a Buddy celebrates its 20th anniversary this summer. This fun literacy program is a great way to keep kids engaged and learning during their time away from school.

Stopping the Summer Slide

School-age children look forward to their summer vacations—sometimes for the entire school year. But these months out of school can be an interruption to their intellectual development. Known as the summer slide, vacations are a time when children are no longer exposed to structured learning. Without a plan to prevent this slide, children can face a disadvantage when they return to school in the fall. Skokie Public Library's Booking with a Buddy program, which pairs up younger and older readers, has worked to offset this interruption to reading for two decades.

“Libraries know all about the summer slide,” says Youth Services Librarian Amanda O’Brien (who is known to friends and Buddies as Mandy). Mandy has been there since the beginning of Booking with a Buddy and she will be on hand again this year for the program’s twentieth summer. “We’ve addressed summer learning loss with reading clubs and other educational programs for decades," she says. "Many Skokie families rely on the library to act as a sort of summer school."

Youth Services Librarian Amanda O'Brien.

Little Buddies/Big Buddies

Children who are entering first through third grades in the fall are eligible to participate in this fun literacy program. The little buddies meet on Mondays and Wednesdays in the Youth Services Department where they are matched with their big buddy counterparts. The children in the program spend ten hours over five weeks reading with big buddy volunteers who range in age from junior high school students to senior adults.

Time slots are assigned based on the availability of volunteers. During their time together, the buddy pairs read together and participate in early literacy games and activities which inspire reading success and instill confidence.

"After 45 minutes of reading, I gather all the pairs back in the program room to play a group-based reading game or activity," Mandy says. "Some of our most popular activities have included Zingo, Word on the Street Junior, and Silly Sentences." These games add incentive to learning and give Mandy an opportunity to assess how the pairs are interacting with each other.

The program is especially beneficial for kids who resist being read to by their parents or teachers. Sometimes, according to Mandy, they just respond better to tweens, teens, and young adults who the kids see as role models, not authority figures. “We work very hard to match children with big buddies who complement individual reading styles and bring out the best in each child,” Mandy says, noting that it’s the volunteers who make the program truly successful. “Our enthusiastic volunteers are excited about making a difference in the life of a child, many having been little buddies themselves in the past.”

In addition to benefits, such as improved vocabulary and better comprehension, kids also gain important social skills for navigating new or unfamiliar situations.

Close to 2,000 kids have participated in the program since its first year and Big Buddy volunteers have gone on to careers as teachers, doctors, and lawyers.

Registration is closed for 2017, but if you know a child who will be entering first through third grade in the fall of 2018, be sure to sign them up next summer.

In the meantime, check out this list of five things parents can do to help prevent summer slide. You can also sign up for Beanstack, a free online tool to help parents get book recommendations for kids and track their reading progress over the summer and throughout the year. And make sure the kids all have their own library cards. Children who live in Skokie may apply for a library card when they are able to write their first and last name.