Dad's Summer Reading Program: Satisfying Book Recommendations

Having started Dad's Summer Reading Program two years ago, I can now qualify it as a moderate success.  The original objective of getting our younger son to read more might have happened anyway, but it seemed to kick start him that year, and he's been a pretty solid pleasure reader since then.

This year, the boys raced out to their first incentive milestone and then flagged a bit.  Family vacation and two weeks at camp cut reading time, although our older son reprised his adorable vacation habit of reading Dave Barry books aloud with his cousin who's about a year older.

Although the quantity of reading has not been fabulous, I was very satisfied when two books that I picked up at the library unbidden for our rising eighth grader resonated nicely.  Competent Mother and I both really enjoyed Lois Lowry's A Summer To Die.  Actually, that's the book that turned me into a reader-for-pleasure.  CM also loved Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.  Although the boy raved about neither book, he finished both of them before we knew it and said - with a thirteen-year-old's* nonchalance, "Oh yeah.  I liked them."  Super pleased that the (recent) classics still appeal, despite all of the new options.

Update: Dad's Summer Reading Program

No doubt careful CP readers have been wondering how Dad's Summer Reading Program has been going.  So far, so good.    Because the impulse behind the program was getting Teddy to read more, I'm pleased to report that he was the first to redeem a coupon.  He got to ten books by June 30, and he chose a pack of Pokemon cards as his reward.  Amazingly, the library only calls for reading five books to "complete" their Summer Reading program for the whole summer!

He's rated his books quite highly so far: five books at five stars, one at 4 1/2, two at 3 1/2 and one at two stars.  The stinker was Rise of the Serpentine, a Lego Ninjago book.  He called Darkwing Duck and the Calvin and Hobbes collection Something Under the Bed is Drooling "very funny" and gave them five stars.  He's also delved into some more honest-to-goodness chapter books.

Charlie hasn't gotten to his first 15-book milestone, but I'll keep you posted.

As a family, we're reading Little House on the Prairie at bed time and on road trips.  That will count toward their rewards when we finish it.  They don't know that the reward is reading it.

Dad's Summer Reading Program

We have one avid reader (the 10-year-old) and one who reads in discouragingly short bursts (the 6-year-old).  Immediately following a trip to the library, he reads with a high degree of absorption.  His usual habit is then to declare himself finished with at least one of the books he just got before it seems possible that he could have finished it.  He also gets really excited about a series of books (e.g. Magic Treehouse) for about 2 1/2 books.  I tend to find out that he "doesn't like those anymore" upon bringing home a stack of four of whatever series it was from the library.

All this is to say that I did not think that our library's summer reading program would be enough

to get him interested in reading this summer.  I have decided, therefore, to supplement it with Dad's Summer Reading Program.  The boys found at their places this morning four coupons, two of which are picture at the right.  They can choose whatever order in which they redeem these coupons for rewards valued at under five dollars.  They just have to show me their reading logs when they've reached a milestone (10 books per reward for the younger and 15 books per reward for He Who Would Read No Matter What).

We'll see how it works.  The younger complained that 10 books was too many at the same time that he planned the order in which he would redeem all four of his coupons.  The older chose one that he would redeem first then said "Maybe I'll read 75 books [15 more than the sum of all his incentive milestones] and get a five-pack of cars."  While I appreciate both his ambition and his confidence that he could negotiate terms completely different from those offered in writing, I think I'll stick to my original plan.

Watch this space for updates.

Early Reading

A few months into Kindergarten, Teddy is armed with a few sight words. He's really strong on "the". Here he "reads" a book with Paige. What I find the funniest is him pretending to read words that he knows by memory. He's known "Fly...Guy" since he was two, but here he performs those words like he's sounding them out. Family reading night - my long held dream - will arrive soon. That's when all four of us will sit in the living room and each read our own thing.