Thank you to Scholastic for sponsoring this post and providing products. The honest opinions are my own.
With school ending soon, if not already, parents all over are looking for ways to keep their kids busy in the long hot days ahead. That’s why I am excited about the Scholastic Summer Reading Program.
You’ve probably heard of the summer slide, it’s where kids lose some of their learning due to being out of school in the summer. It doesn’t stop there. When they return to school they have to play catch up to get to where they were.. Teachers spend 4-6 weeks re-teaching materials in the beginning of the year because of the summer slide.
The Scholastic Summer Reading Program is a free online program dedicated to stopping the summer slide. The program is fun and interactive and encourages kids to read throughout the summer. Since summer vacation starts soon here, I went ahead and signed Kora & Logan up for their own accounts. They are excited about this program and have already started logging their reading minutes.
Being 8 & 9, they love being able to hop on the computer, go to their account, and type in the minutes they read for that day.
It gives them a sense of responsibility and they also look forward to the digital rewards when they complete the weekly reading challenges. In just the past week they earned the Smile Badge.
They are also excited to enter the monthly sweepstakes where they have a chance to win some amazing prizes.
This year’s challenge theme is “Power Up & Read” powered by Energizer and the program runs from May 4th – September 4th, 2015.
Kids can log their minutes online and via mobile as they read to break last year’s world record of 304,749,861 minutes.
We participated in this program last year and it was so much fun! In fact, I was happy to hear Kora & Logan say on occasion, “I have to go read my book for 20 minutes so I can log my minutes later!” We are all excited about this year’s program as well, it will be lots of fun, encouraging, and motivating.
Along with the theme here’s what else is new this year:
- Kids can unlock 12 original short stories (exclusively for this year’s challenge) from favorite children’s authors and access never-before-seen videos with the authors
- The authors include: Blue Balliett, Patrik Henry Bass, Varian Johnson, Gordon Korman, Michael Northtrop, Maggie Stiefvater and Jackson Pierce, Roland Smith, R.L. Stine, Tui T. Sutherland, Lauren Tarshis, Wendy Wan-Long Shang and Jude Watson
- There are also “read along” audio components to the stories so kids of all ages and reading levels can enjoy them
- Kids can play the new “innovation machine” game – an interactive creative writing game and enter its contest to win prizes
- Kids can log minutes on the go
- The parents site features daily tips, a weekly “Power Up & Read Kit” sweepstakes, videos about summer reading activities, free resources, printables, and booklists
We recommend the Scholastic Summer Reading Program to anyone with children in their lives. It’s an encouraging and motivating program that is fun, interactive, and free!
Sign up for the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge here.
Have fun and have a great summer reading!
Summer reading programs are great for summer vacation to keep the kids learning. We have a summer reading program at the local library near us that the kids get involved in, and they love it. Very cool this can be done online, going to make my kids accounts for this.
What a great program. I am going to pass this info on to my daughters. Thank you!