Coming up: Book It!

I stumbled across the Book It! reading campaign this morning. I’m not even sure how I got there, to be honest. Evidently Pizza Hut has been sponsoring this program for the past 25 years. I’d never heard of it since they didn’t have it when I was a child. The program starts on March 1st and the challenge is to read with your child for 20 minutes per day, 5 days a week for 8 weeks. They offer the ability to compete for prize packages for both individual participants and for classrooms. It appears that they used to offer free individual pizza coupons to participants. That aspect of the program has been discontinued. For us, that’s no big deal since Tornado Boy can’t eat gluten, so he wouldn’t be able to eat it anyway. He does love reading and he really likes reward charts, so I think this will be a lot of fun for us.  I’m so glad that it’s open to individuals!

The REDzone (Read Every Day) site has a place to sign up and you can download the tracking charts to go along with the program. On February 18th, there will be an intro webcast featuring John Lithgow reading “Carnival of the Animals”. Individuals can register now and get a reminder to start the reading portion of the program on March 1st. Each week, you can also read a free interactive story book through the One More Story site. We enjoyed their free preview story Pete’s a Pizza this morning. The site is really well done. You can either listen to a book (and watch the words as they’re being read), or you can mute the narrator and read the story yourself. Similar to Starfall – the child can click on a word to hear it read if they don’t know how to pronounce it on their own.

There are book lists, read along activities and printables available on the REDzone site.  I’m very excited to participate in this program.  I think Tornado Boy is really going to love it.