Andy Update 6/8

At the end of the school year, I challenged all my students to read 90 books in 90 days over the summer.  I have no idea if anyone took me up on the challenge, but my 6 year old son, Andy, overheard me talking about it and decided he wanted to too.

He’s still being a normal kid – 2 baseball games this week, a trip to the forest preserve, and playing superheroes in the backyard with his brothers have taken up most of his time, but it seems that all the time he used to spend watching TV is now spent reading.  It’s awesome.  Today is Friday, and the TV hasn’t been on in our house since Sunday night.

Since I last updated the world on Andy’s 90 book progress, he’s finished 13 more books!  That puts him at 23 books read so far this summer!  Some of them are easy, some are pretty challenging, some he reads on his own, some he wants to read to his brothers or to me.  None of that matters as long as he’s reading.  I hope all my students are too.

First, he read Ten, Nine, Eight a Caldecott winning counting book to his little brothers (Jake and Josh, both 3 years old).  They seemed to like it, and can’t stop pointing out numbers everywhere they go now.  Yesterday, at Andy’s baseball game, they told me all the kids’ jersey numbers – except number 11 and 12, because those weren’t in the book.
Next was Robots: Meet the Robots an early reader book book that Andy found at a library book sale a few years ago.  It had big words like technology and industries that I was pretty impressed that he was able to handle on his own.

His second dinosaur book was Gigantosaurus and Other Big Dinosaurs. Thanks to Dino Dan, Andy knew how to pronounce most of the dinosaur names better than I could.  We both learned a lot about prehistoric plants and animals from this book, so I’m sure when we make our next trip to the library, we’ll pick up another book from this series.

Last summer, in our home town of Plano, a whole bunch of Hollywood people showed up to film a new Superman movie.  Ever since then, the whole town is a little Superman crazy.  The sign that welcomes people to town mentions the movie, there’s a big Superman/Smallville mural in town, the hardware store has a big picture of the hero to advertise their super savings, the local ice cream shop has a Superman flavor…  Superman is everywhere, even at the local dollar store, where I found a bunch of Superman board books.  Andy just read Superman: Secret Superpowers to his brothers the other day.

One of the cool perks of being a teacher is that every once in a while you get some free stuff.  Whenever students order from the Scholastic book order forms, the teacher gets some “points” that they can use for free books.  Usually I get books for the classroom, but sometimes, when I see something good, I get some books for my kids.  Last year I got them the Fly Guy books.  Andy loves them because their gross and hilarious.  This week he got on a little Fly Guy kick and read three of them: Hi! Fly Guy, There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed Fly Guy, and Shoo, Fly Guy!  

Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten is a fun little book that Andy’s grandma bought for him about a year ago, as he got ready for kindergarten.  I think he’s getting nostalgic for his kindergarten classmates, because the other day he read this one three times, then paged through his school yearbook for about an hour.

All of these books put Andy at 18 for the summer.  I’ll update on the next bunch later on.

How many books have you read so far this summer???