Birmingham Legion FC kicks off summer reading program

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. ( WIAT ) — As schools wrap up for the year, the Legion FC is kicking off a new reading program to encourage children to keep reading through the summer.

Some kids can lose knowledge over the summer if they don’t keep flexing their ever-learning muscle: the brain. To help them get ahead of the game, kindergarten through fifth-grade students can earn one free ticket to a Legion home game for every three books they read .

“Our players want to be ingrained in the community and this was a way to do that,” Birmingham Legion FC president & GM Jay Heaps said. “Our players, you know, they adamantly want to be actively in the community, they come to my office and say how can we get further into the community and so that’s kind of the launch of this.”

Some residents think it’s a great idea for local athletes to encourage summer reading.

“I feel like it’s something that we do need to start pushing better at younger ages but also keeping them into it,” Birmingham resident Abby Leib said. “I mean, I should do summer reading for myself because we’re more tidbit in learning now it seems like and not learning through the whole.”

According to the community-based summer learning program “Summer Adventures In Learning” (SAIL), students can lose two to three months of the knowledge gained during the school year over the summer.

Sixth grader Mitchell Leib notices a difference if she goes back to school without keeping up with some skills during the summer.

“Your mind isn’t as caught up as it should be,” Leib said. “It’s just good to once you had school and you’re like used to it, just continuing and not like getting behind and starting back up again.”

SAIL says it’s important for kids to be reading at grade level by the time they get to fourth grade because that’s when it switches from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.”

“The cumulative summer learning loss over time can end up as a senior as a four-year gap,” SAIL director Suzy Harris said. “It’s especially keen in under-resourced communities, where students don’t have access to travel, to library, regular library attendance, things like that.”

Jefferson County ESL teacher Dr. Michael Franklin says parents should take advantage of any educational moment over the summer and make it a fun experience with their kids.

“When we are at home and cooking those recipes over the summer, we want to read those to our child but then we want to get our student to read those back to us,” Dr. Franklin said. “When we’re in the car, my mom used to play the license plate game with me and we would make crazy words and phrases out of what we saw on license plates but also the ones that actually have words on them, let’s read them.”

For more information about the Learning with Legion FC summer reading program, click here.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to CBS 42.