Kids don’t learn reading skills just once! Reading skills take repetition and practice, not just yearly reviews but practice throughout the year as well. But to kids, this essential practice can sometimes look like just a rehash of something they learned last year. That’s one reason why seasonal and holiday activities are so welcome to teachers. Seasonal or holiday themes are a great way to sneak in some much-needed practice under the guise of something new!

While making my reading task cards, I was thinking of what skills kids most need to review frequently, and a few general areas came to mind – story elements, text structures, vocabulary skills, and just basic reading comprehension of main ideas and details. For skills like identifying character traits, using context clues, or comparing and contrasting, it sees like there can never be too much practice. And even for kids who are great with the basic reading skills, there is always more that can be learned.

The one problem that I’ve found with using seasonal themed resources is that it can be time-consuming to find or prepare resources with the right skills each season. Having something ready in advance can be a big help. For teachers who might like to have a ready stash of reading resources to pull out as each season arrives, I now have four sets of task cards with this basic reading skills content and a seasonal theme in my store – one each for autumn, winter, spring, and summer. I’ll show you some samples.

Autumn Reading Skills

The autumn set focuses on some of the most perennial reading skills- basics for good comprehension of fiction as well as informational texts. The skills covered in these 30 cards include:

Main Idea and Supporting Details
Context Clues
Cause and Effect
Sequence of Events
Fact or Opinion

Winter Reading Skills

The winter set is all about holidays – Christmas, Hanukkah,Kwanzaa, New Years, and Chinese New Years Day, and about fun in the snow! These are the skills included:

Making Inferences
Setting
Cause and Effect
Predicting
Context Clues
Characterization

Spring Reading Skills

The spring cards are about topics like nature, spring sports, spring activities, and holidays. As with the autumn cards, the skills are:

Main Idea
Context Clues
Cause and Effect
Sequence of Events
Fact or Opinion

Summer Skills

And finally for summer – here’s a set of cards that kids can take home to practice the basics and make into a little booklet to bring back to school when they return in the fall. This set includes a little bit of everything language arts – reading, vocabulary, and writing. The activities include practice in reading, writing, and vocabulary, plus some fun summer puzzles. Here are the topics are: