Summer Reading is Cool

Yesterday my son went from being a kindergartner to a first grader!  When he came home he had a present to open, and I will give you one guess as to what was in his gift bag.  If you guessed books, you win!  We gave him three books, and when I saw this one at the book store, I knew it was perfect since I have been looking for a book all about summer!

Summer by Alice Low is an I Can Read It All By Myself Beginner Books!  In this charming rhyming book, the kids do all of the fun things that you imagine doing in summer.  They eat ice cream, watch fireworks, ride a Ferris wheel, and catch butterflies.  Many of the things that the children participate in are included on our own summer leap lists!  My son enjoyed this book, and even brought it downstairs this morning to read again right away.  He can definitely help me read this book since there are many sight words in it.  

This summer, we are going to try to keep track of all of the books that we read!  I know that all of the summer reading incentives have you keep track of minutes which is fine, but minutes are hard for my kids to visualize.  I know it is better for them if we keep track of the number of books that we read instead of minutes.  So I brainstormed a creative way to keep track and this is what I came up with.

Summer brings lots of ice cream, so we started our own ice cream cones with a scoop of ice cream for every book we read.  If we read it again, then we are adding a sticker to the ice cream scoop.  I know that we will need to add more cones as the days go on, but it will be fun to watch our ice cream cones grow!

First, I printed out a couple of ice cream cones.  I also cut out a bunch of ice cream scoops.

Tonight, after reading, my son added some scoops to his ice cream cone and smiled the whole time.  His poster is sitting right next to our reading spot in his room.

Here is my first grader's ice cream cone.  Both boys ran to his room before bed so they could add some scoops to his cone.  This is what my first grader has read in 24 hours.  

We will post pictures at the end of the week and throughout the summer to show you how big our ice cream cones have gotten!

How are you going to have your kids keep track of their summer reading?