First grade students at Wyman Elementary School has a special visitor last week to kick off their 2016 Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge: First Gentleman Andy Moffit.

The Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge is an initiative trying to encourage young students to read throughout the summer months to prevent “summer slide”

Jacqueline Dodge, a representative from Scholastic who was at Wyman with Moffit on June 2, said that, statistically, kids who do not read adequately throughout the summer can lose a percentage of what they learned in the school year previously and come to school less prepared in September. Reading just four books a summer can prevent summer slide for young students.

Scholastic developed the Summer Reading Challenge to help encourage students to read throughout the summer months, by having them log their reading minutes on a kid-friendly website. By the end of the summer the school with the most minutes per states receives a Scholastic sponsored party and gets noted in the Scholastic Book of Records along with the top 20 schools nationwide.

Last year, Marieville Elementary in North Providence won with 456,500 logged minutes. Park Elementary in Warwick came in second with 442,372 minutes.

To kick off the challenge, First Gentleman Andy Moffit went to several schools, which have already signed up for the challenge, to read to students and tell them the importance of reading.

At Wyman, Moffit read “Caps For Sale” by Esphyr Slobodkina to both Karin Friedman and Geraldine Lewis’s first grade classes.

“When you read you can go anywhere you want, places you’ve never been before,” Moffit told the classes.

He told them how their brain is a muscle and without regular “exercise” it could become weaker. He asked them to read every day over the summer so they would be ready for 2nd grade and said he would be doing the same.

Moffit was involved last year as well with the reading challenge, visiting schools as part of the kickoff and then visiting the winning school to congratulate them on their success.

Dodge explained that governors’ spouses across the country partner with Scholastic to promote and encourage summer reading.

She explained that “when students see a recognizable and important figure talking about the importance of reading, they better understand and reading becomes important to them as well.”

“We know without reading students lose some of what they learned during the school year,” Moffit said. “They work so hard with their teachers throughout the year, it’s important they keep up that work on their own and with their families during the summer.”

As a competitor in the challenge Wyman received a donation of 100 books from Scholastic to disperse to students for summer use.

For more information on the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge or to sign up a school visit www.scholatic.com/summer. The Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge runs from May 9 to September 9.