Summer Reading Program

Our Library joins with all the other libraries in the County for a Summer Reading Program every year.  This is our second year participating.  I love it.  Partly because I remember enjoying a similar program as a kid, and partly because it's fun, and partly because it's great incentive to read through the summer.  It runs from mid-June to mid-August.  It ended this week.

How does it work you ask?  Good question.  You record the books you read on a little card and every 5 books earns you a "dollar." Every 1-50 pages counts as a book (so a 125 page book counts as 3 books). They don't have to be library books to count.  You can also count e-books, or books you read at grandma's house, as long as it's the first time you read it. We don't get many longer books at our house yet. 

We earned, between Stella and Bruce, 33 dollars this summer.  I was pretty impressed by that.  I did a little math and figured out that 33 tickets equals 82.5 books read this summer (  (33x5)/2= 82.5  and I did that by hand not calculator).  F

There are prizes to buy with your dollars too.  They can get a snack for a dollar, or a trinket for 1,2,5,10, 15.  Or for 5 dollars they could pick a book from a collection they had on a table by the circulation desk.  I didn't give my kids many options, and held onto their dollars for them until last week.  Then we found the books and picked out 2 each.  They were excited to bring home books from the library to keep.  This week we counted up the rest of our dollars and Stella picked a prize and a book (she actually got two cheap little throw away books about My Little Ponies, not my first choice in reading material), and I picked out three books for Bruce. 

All told from the summer reading that we would have done anyway we "earned"  7 good books, 2 cheap books, and a large bouncy ball.  Not a bad summer! 

Do you participate in a summer reading program?

Two Benefits in Raising a Reader

I've been thinking lately and noticing that there are some fringe benefits to raising a reader.  These are little things.  I'm not going to talk about how reading to your kids makes them smarter, or helps them excel in school, or get a more complete education, although I do believe those things are true.  No I'm thinking along a much more selfish line of thought.  The 2 benefits I want to talk about are these, cuddle time and vocabulary expansion.

Cuddle time is pretty rare around our house.  We all like it, but we're all movers too.  The kids are busy playing, I'm busy doing... whatever it is that moms do. and so we are rarely sitting down together to just be with each other.  So a benefit of reading to the kids frequently is getting to sit down with the cutest, most wonderful kids on the planet on my lap or curled up under my arm to read a book.  Sometimes one will even stay once the story is done to chat about it, or just cuddle, since we're already there.

And, well, vocabulary is pretty self explanatory too, isn't it.  But oh my goodness. The things that my 4 year old says astound me sometimes!  I mean really how many four-year-olds are out there yelling "Bye, Mom, I'm off to the race and I'll certainly win."  Or "The man of strength."  How about "And then I gasped..." and then there is my favorite of "... And I careened into the car" Certainly?! Gasped?! Man of Strength?! Careened?! The only reason that I can come up with to explain this vocab is reading.  That's all we do.  I'm not sitting down doing formal vocabulary.  No flash cards, no workbooks, just reading.  Often.  And good books and bad books and cheap books and quality books.

Totally worth every interruption of "my" day.  Dinner can wait.  She's only going to want to read with me for so long.  I don't want to miss any of it!