Thursday, September 18, 2014

"Fizz, Boom, Read!" Summer Reading Program 2014

The kids and I did A LOT of reading this summer!  Within the 2 months that our library's summer reading program ran, I read 24 hours to the kids.  Morgan ended up with nearly 74 hours, so 50 hours of reading on her own!  Blake ended with about 29 hours, which was mostly from what I read to him, but Morgan read some books to him too without me.
 
It's really fun reading with the kids, but a couple things made it a little extra fun this summer.  The library's summer reading program theme was science, which the kids LOVE.  They kicked off the summer reading program by having the Michigan Science Center come and do all sorts of neat fire-type reactions.  I have to admit that it was pretty awesome!  I was so involved that I almost forgot to take pictures, but got a couple at the very end. :-)
 
 Beyond the kick-off, the library then had a different science activity almost every Friday.  We missed the first one where they were making lava lamps, but we made it to make terrariums.  (FYI-I can not keep house plants alive...they died, we replaced them, those died...I gave up!)
 
There was a sink/float activity that I didn't get pictures of.  Basically the kids put different things in water to see what would sink and what would float, then they experimented with different candy to see what would sink/float.
 
The kids also made what is a lot like silly putty one Friday.  That was pretty cool...as you can see from Morgan's expression :-)

Another Friday, we had some friends over, and they went with us to do some solar activities.  The kids made bracelets with beads that changed color in the light and raced solar cars. :-)
 
The last 'science' activity was mostly using pop and having it react to things.  The best one was using pop and Mentos and seeing the pop shoot WAY up in the air! :-)
 
The library ends the summer reading program with a picnic each year and this year they had a local place come and bring some exotic animals.  I hadn't heard of most of the animals before and it was really neat learning about each one!
 
There were also prizes drawn after the picnic and Morgan happened to win one!  It just topped off a very fun reading program this summer.

The other thing that made reading extra fun for us this summer was reading some classics and then having movie nights to watch the movies based on those classics.  These are the ones that I can remember reading: Little Women, A Little Princess, How to Train Your Dragon (saw the movie first, then wanted to read the book) and The Secret Garden.  It seems like there were more, but those were the main ones.  I think we read some of the stories that the Disney Princess movies were based off of too.  We also read Farmer Boy, (we had read Little House in Big Woods this past winter), and I hope to read Little House on the Prairie soon too.  I hope to track down some of the TV episodes so the kids can see those after we read it.  We had SO MUCH fun doing this, I hope to do even more next summer...if I can wait that long...it might end up being an ongoing thing.  ;-)

2 comments:

mail4rosey said...

You did have a fun go at it! Our summer reading program at the library is just the kids logging their time and getting prizes w/in the category of time spent reading at the end. It's okay, but not fun like this one!

Alexis AKA MOM said...

LOVE it, I made a science birthday gift a while back and had those in there. My friends son had so much fun!

I loved making silly putty :)

 
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