Educate Online offers free one-on-one tutoring with certified instructors. It was created through the No Child Left Behind Act and is carried out by the United States Department of Education in conjunction with local school districts. Tutoring is completed online and uses the company's proprietary software. The tutoring is comprehensive and tailored to each student's unique needs.
If students need a light refresher during the summer to their keep skill levels high, Scholastic's Success With Tests Reading Comprehension can provide an adequate challenge without a heavy investment of time. This resource is designed to follow the state and national comprehensive test formats and garnered high reviews from parents and teachers on various commercial outlets. Success With Tests: Reading Workbook focuses primarily on reading comprehension during test situations. Use of this book would require some parent and student motivation. This book is quite inexpensive and is from a well-respected educational company.
Merit provides high-quality reading comprehension software aimed at improving reading skill and accuracy. It allows for tailored instruction with progress tracking. The program is primarily student-driven but allows for full report generation for parents and instructors. The home version of this software is slightly expensive in comparison to similar home educational software programs but can be used to track the student's progress through 11th grade. It was recommended to students of Project Renaissance, facilitated by Florida State College at Jacksonville.
Scholastic has a highly interactive web portal called Stacks for Kids to encourage students to read throughout the year, but it has a special reading challenge for the summer. Students record reading minutes to beat reading records of friends and other students, compete in trivia challenges and play a number of web-based games. This program aids in encouraging general reading habits and a love of reading and could be combined with other reading programs. It is highly recommended by many educators and school districts.
The chain bookseller Barnes & Noble has a summer reading passport program that allows students to get a coupon for a free book from Barnes & Noble's passport reading list for every eight books the students read. The bookseller also offers a host of downloadable activities on their website for direct comprehension practice. This program could be combined with other programs for further practice.