Halfway There

As of this week, I am just over halfway through my internship at Scholastic. At moments like this, it’s tempting to ask where the time has gone, but I already know the answer to that question. It’s disappeared into the projects I’ve been working on, of course!

Every summer, the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge encourages kids to keep track of how many minutes they read while on school break, aiming to prevent the effects of the “summer slide” – the learning losses that can occur during the summer months. On July 9, the participants broke the 2013 world record for minutes read (176,438,473!), and they’re on track to hit the 200 million mark very soon. Kids can also link their tallies to their schools; bestselling author Gordon Korman (The Hypnotists) and bestselling author-illustrator David Shannon (Bugs in My Hair!) will visit the U.S. middle school and top U.S. elementary school, respectively, with the most minutes logged.

This year, Scholastic worked closely with a team of top parent bloggers to help promote the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge. I already knew that parent bloggers (often called mommy bloggers, though that’s not fair to the dads among them) were a “thing.” But seeing the responses to their posts about the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge made me realize what a powerful force they are for spreading the word about something child-related. It does make a lot of sense when you think about it, though. Not many people are more passionate about ways to help kids learn and grow and have fun than moms and dads. And blogs about parenting really get read because so many people are parents, and of course they’re looking online for information and community.

I’ve been formatting and printing clips of parent bloggers’ coverage of the Summer Reading Challenge; these will eventually go into a binder that records the initiative’s overall efforts and successes. More and more coverage comes in every week, and it’s pretty impressive when you see it all together! I also compiled a roundup of good things that parenting bloggers have had to say about the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge for Scholastic’s On Our Minds blog. If you want to read that, and to see some adorable pictures of bloggers’ children with the books Scholastic sent them, you can click here.

A couple weeks ago, I also wrote another blog post to commemorate the anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird on July 11. Shoutout to my seventh grade literature teacher, Mrs. Zehring, for doing an amazing job teaching the book and for writing the thought-provoking exam question that inspired the post.

Speaking of the school I attended in Memphis, this weekend I took a peek at how they and some other schools I’m familiar with are doing in the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge. (Scholastic’s website offers all participants the chance to see a school’s total minutes read.) Those schools are doing pretty well, considering how small they are. It almost makes me want to join the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge myself, even though I’m a good seven years past the age limit. I wonder if Greek textbooks and mommy blogs count as summer reading?

See you next week!

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2014 at 12:44 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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