Hi, I try to give my students an opportunity to talk to each other and to share what they did over the break. One activity is a "Welcome Back Scavenger Hunt" with clues and challenges that help students get reacquainted with each other. You can also use this to reintroduce topics or classroom routines and procedures. Of course welcome letters, or having students create profiles of themselves and then having the students pitch themselves to the class to see who has the best profile. This is a fun and active way to engage students and have them work on verbal skills as well.

There's a few ways that I encourage our families to help their students read at home:
create some sort of fun challenge that you all can complete together. Reading together pushes both parties to hold each other accountable. Create a literacy calendar of sorts to track progress, daily activity or even to just to see how often your student is reading. Lastly you could run some sort of workshop for families to learn some techniques, as we know as educators our families are busy but if they had some tools in their tool box this could help take the stress away.