Happy June! Quick question: Is summer over yet? Of course, I’m kidding. What kind of sane person would actually want summer to fly by?
Still, things are looking a little different at our house this year. For the most part, my husband is staying home with our two kids this summer, so we’ve been joking quite a bit about “Daddy Day Care.” I was a little skeptical of this arrangement at first, but I figured Tom had earned it. Last summer seemed to consist entirely of classes for his teaching program. This year, he wanted to actually spend time with the kids and maybe accomplish a few things around the house, such as planting a garden.
I will admit there is one thing I miss: my quiet lunch breaks where I could watch The Price Is Right in peace.
The whole arrangement has gone pretty well so far. However, I do have a tendency to eye everyone suspiciously each morning and wonder exactly what they plan to accomplish that day. To keep the kids somewhat on track, we started using summer checklists. Things like making the bed, brushing teeth, getting dressed, playing outside and doing something creative. So far, it seems to be working.
One item high on my list was reading. Jackson just finished first grade and is already a strong reader, testing above grade level. I’d like to keep that momentum going and avoid the dreaded summer learning loss. The school helps by sending home information about summer reading challenges. Students can either read a certain number of books or earn Accelerated Reader points.
Many parents and grandparents are probably familiar with AR points. Accelerated Reader has been around since the 1980s. Kids read books, take quizzes and earn points based on the length and difficulty of what they’ve read. This is Jackson’s first summer with the AR option. His official goal is 20 points by the end of summer, but he’s already set a personal goal of 25.
This excites me more than it probably should. Why? Because those reading quizzes are essentially book trivia, and if you’ve read this column more than once, you know exactly how I feel about trivia.
This also brought back a memory from my own school days. At some point during my middle school or high school years, Britton-Hecla started incorporating AR into the curriculum. I honestly can’t remember exactly when. What I do remember is discovering that I could take quizzes on books I had already read.
For a kid who already loved reading, this was fantastic news.
I tested on all the Harry Potter books and pretty much everything else I was reading anyway. There were fewer quizzes available back then than there are today, but there were still enough options to keep me busy.
I will confess to one somewhat questionable strategy.
Occasionally, I took quizzes on books I hadn’t technically read but had watched the movie adaptation of. This is risky business because you never know how faithful a movie is to the source material.
One day, however, I decided to really push my luck. Our family has watched the Lonesome Dove miniseries more times than I can count. I could probably quote large sections of it from memory. At some point I may have attempted to read the actual book, but have you seen that thing? It’s nearly 900 pages long.
So I did what any ambitious student would do. I took the AR quiz anyway. And somehow, against all odds, I passed. Even better, Lonesome Dove was worth a pile of points.
I eventually finished second in my class for AR points. If memory serves, the only person who beat me was Shawna Swanson, who was an absolutely prolific reader and thoroughly deserved the title.
Back in the present day, Jackson has been doing great with his reading goals. He’s already nearly a quarter of the way to his summer target. We’ve taken quizzes on books we’ve read dozens of times. We’ve tried quizzes on newer books. And we’ve also learned the valuable lesson that sometimes rereading and reviewing before a test is a very good idea.
I will admit it’s been difficult not to shove my 7-year-old aside and take over the book trivia myself, but I’ve managed to restrain that impulse. The program seems to have him genuinely excited about reading, and that’s a win in my book.
Still, I can’t help but wonder what the librarian and school administration would think if a second grader showed up this fall having passed the AR test for Lonesome Dove. That might raise a few eyebrows.
