How to Get Through Boring Assigned Summer Reading: Tips From a Teacher and Mom
The sticky cherry popsicle dripped down the spine of Javi’s copy of The Red Badge of Courage onto my kitchen table last Tuesday, leaving a pink splotch next to his printed summer reading assignment. My 13-year-old slouched back in his chair, thumb hovering over TikTok on his phone, and sighed so loud the salt shaker rattled. “Mom, how do I force myself to read this boring thing?” he asked. I wiped popsicle juice off my wrist and nodded – I get that question more than any other this time of year, both from my own kids and my 7th grade ELA students.
It’s 90 degrees outside, his soccer practice doesn’t start for another two hours, and every part of this scenario feels like the opposite of what summer is supposed to be. I get it. I still remember forcing myself through Moby Dick the summer after 10th grade, counting down the pages until I could go back to reading the cheesy horror novels I actually loved. Last year, one of my students, Mia, came to me crying the first week of school because she hadn’t finished her assigned summer reading. She told me she’d started three times, sat on her bed staring at the page for an hour, and couldn’t make herself turn another page. She thought she was lazy, or bad at reading, but the problem wasn’t her – the book was boring, and she was trying to force it the wrong way.
I told Javi what I tell all my students: forget forcing it with big willpower. Willpower runs out by mid-July, especially when you’d rather be swimming or hanging out with friends. The first trick is the two page rule. You don’t have to hit the 20 pages a day the assignment suggests – right now, you just have to read two pages. That’s it. When you’re done, you can put the book down and go back to whatever you were doing. Nine times out of 10, once you’ve already started, you’ll keep going. The hardest part of any boring task isn’t doing it – it’s starting it.
Javi rolled his eyes, but he slammed his phone face down on the table and leaned in. He read two pages, huffed, and then turned another. Before I knew it, he’d gotten to the first battle scene, and he’d read 14 pages total before he stopped to grab another popsicle. That’s more progress than he’d made all week.
The second thing I tell kids is that skipping is allowed. I’m a teacher, and I can tell you right now: most of us don’t assign summer reading because we care if you read every single adjective describing a 19th century forest. We assign it to keep you in the habit of reading over break. If a 3-page tangent about mending uniforms is putting you to sleep, stick a sticky note there so you can come back to it if you need to, and turn the page. No one is going to test you on every throwaway line. I skipped 40 pages of whaling descriptions in Moby Dick and still got an A on the first test back at school. No one ever noticed.
The third small change is moving the book away from your phone. I don’t mean you have to sit at a stuffy desk to read. Bring it to the porch swing while you wait for your hot dog to grill. Bring it to the car when you wait for your sibling to get done at swim practice. Even bring it to the bathroom if that’s the only 10 minutes you have alone. The key is to charge your phone across the room, not next to you. If you need your phone to look up unfamiliar words, put it on airplane mode after you open the dictionary app. One buzz from a text, and you’re done for the day.
As a parent, I’ve learned the hard way that hovering makes everything worse. My older son and I fought about summer reading every night for two years before I stopped asking “did you read today?” every time he walked in the door. Now, we put a little blank sticky note on the inside cover of the book. The kid just puts a check mark every day they read any amount at all. At the start of the week, we pick a small goal – 6 checks a week, that’s it. If you miss a day, you don’t get grounded, you just get an extra check next week. I don’t check it every day. They know the goal, and it’s their job to hit it.
Another small trick that works for a lot of kids is pairing reading with a reward you only get when you read. I don’t mean big rewards like a new video game if you finish the book. Those are too far away to matter. It’s small, immediate rewards: you only get to eat your favorite sour candy while you read. You can only listen to your favorite new playlist when you’re reading. After you finish your reading session, you get 15 minutes of unstructured screen time before dinner. It’s a small trigger that trains your brain to get into reading mode, and it gives you a little something to look forward to right away.
Javi is still halfway through The Red Badge of Courage, and he still thinks it’s the most boring book ever assigned in the history of middle school. He skips almost all the descriptions of marching, he only reads two pages some days, and he still complains every time he sits down to do it. But he’s getting it done. He’s on track to finish a week before school starts, and we haven’t had a single fight about it this summer. Mia, my student from last year, already finished her summer reading two weeks early this year, and she sent me a photo of her sticky note full of check marks last week.
It’s not a perfect system. It doesn’t turn boring assigned reading into some magical summer adventure. A lot of the time, assigned summer reading is just boring, and that’s okay. You don’t have to love it. You just have to get through it, and these small tricks make it feel a lot less like pulling teeth. We’ll still be here, eating popsicles and complaining, one two-page chunk at a time.
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