There are three ways to get your kids to finish their assigned summer reading – the right way, the wrong way, and the why-did-I-ever-have-kids way.

The right way is that your kids just do it. The wrong way is that you do it for them.

Then there is the why-did-I-ever-have-kids way. This is the path of nagging, stressing, bribing, and cajoling. I’ve been there, but eventually I learned what the problem was and decided to fix it. Now my summers are free of nagging – about summer reading anyway.

When my boys were in middle school, I could never understand why the assigned summer reading was always such a pain to get finished. My boys were capable readers, and they should have been able to manage their summer reading without all the nagging and drama. But it turns out they couldn’t. I learned that managing summer reading is different from doing summer reading. I since have evolved to believe that while they should most definitely do the reading on their own, the managing of the reading needs some help.

Managing a long-term project, like a summer reading assignment, requires organizational and time management skills that some kids just don’t have yet. That’s fine, as long as we acknowledge the problem and address it. Teaching them how to manage long-term assignments is the kind of skill that will help them for the rest of their lives, and when you are old and senile, they will thank you for it.

How do you help them acquire the skills they need to manage a long-term project? I suggest you all sit together, discuss the project, and work to formulate a plan that you can all live with. The plan needs to be specific, with checkpoints along the way. Try the following three, easy steps.

3 Steps To Completing Summer Reading

Understand the Assignment

Make sure you know what books are assigned and how many pages are in each book. Don’t forget to ask if there is any written component to go with the reading assignment. Or do they have to make a project that gets turned in on the first day of school? If so, that should be included in the planning.

Break it into Smaller Pieces

Talk with your child about how many pages per day they think they can read, then do the math. Your job here is to keep it real. Back in the middle school days, my guys would plan to read 100 pages in a day to get it finished faster, but they didn’t enjoy reading that much, and as a result, it didn’t work. They eventually learned that they did better with shorter bursts over a longer period of time.

Schedule it

After you know about how many pages they have to read and how many days that should take them, it is time to help them schedule it. Don’t forget about those written assignments or projects that might go with the reading. Put summer reading on the calendar, just as you would summer camp or a doctor’s appointment. We would schedule some reading time during car trips – just make sure they can take notes neatly if that is required. The idea is to schedule the reading and contain it so that it doesn’t hover over your entire summer like a Black Cloud of Doom.

Once you have implemented your plan, you won’t have to think about it again until the night before school, when your kids can calmly put their summer reading assignments into their new backpacks…assuming they remember where they put that darn assignment.