Summer Reading!

One of the items on our Summer Bucket List is to sign up for the library's summer reading program and visit the library weekly.  My kids love books, and they love the library, but sometimes they have trouble wanting to look for books when we get to the library.  We are blessed with excellent, forward-thinking, kid-friendly public libraries in our area, and as they should, they all have lots of opportunities to learn through play.  The toys are amazing.  And we always take time to play when we're there.  But I wanted to find a way to encourage my kids to really spend some time selecting good books while we were there, too.  The Library Scavenger Hunt was born.  I will share more about it and how to get it in a later blog post, but here's a sneak peek.

Today we went to sign up for the summer reading program.  A little incentive for tracking your summer reading never hurt anyone and my kids were excited to sign up and get started. In addition to our library's summer program, I created my own for Ava to track her reading goals this summer.  I call it the "Summer Reading 100 Book Challenge."  When I was in first grade I loved to read.  To challenge me, my teacher gave me pages that had a caterpillar with boxes to write in the book titles that I read.  I was so proud of myself when I got to 100, and I still have that print-out somewhere today.  It's fun today to look back and see what books I chose to read nearly 35 years ago.  I wanted to offer something similar for Ava where she can write down the books that she reads this summer.  We've been enjoyed the sweet treats this summer so I went with an ice cream theme.  You can find the challenge printable to use yourself here.  If you have younger kids, you could skip writing the book title and just have them color a scoop for every book that is read to them this summer.  Make it work for you!

Added bonus:  This also helps to reinforce counting by 5s  :)