Hosting a “Reading Under the Stars” party

[disclaim]This is a sponsored post.[/disclaim]My kid has been so good about reading this Summer. Thanks to Scholastic’s Summer Reading Challenge, he’s been able to beat Summer learning loss by simply picking up a book and reading. He then hops over to the official Scholastic website and logs his minutes. It’s so easy! At least that’s how he used to do it before we hosted our Reading Under the Stars fiesta. It was there that we found an even easier way of tracking our reading minutes.

We hosted our Reading Under the Stars fiesta on a Saturday afternoon and invited about 20 people. It wasn’t just kids we invited though, we also got the adults in on the fun. We went with this year’s Summer Reading theme – Reading Under the Stars – and because it is powered by EVEREADY®, we also had plenty of flashlights in hand as well as batteries, constellation illustrations, certificates, snacks – and A LOT of books.

However, we got our fiesta started around 7:30 so there was still plenty of daylight. We used materials that were given to us by Scholastic and set up for the kids (and adults!) to come chill out and add a few hundred reading minutes to their logs.

We had books for everyone and in different age ranges. We didn’t pressure them to pick up a book when it was time to start. They each kinda just looked around and pretty soon, the pictures got them hooked and they couldn’t stop reading.

I could not be more happier with the way everything turned out. Who knew that just a few snacks and the books conveniently laid out would make for such a great way to add reading minutes to their log? It was practically effortless on my part.

Pretty soon, the older kids came into the picture too. They wanted to see what the younger kids were doing, but once there, they saw that I had put out books for them too.

I gotta say though, the sweetest (and best) part of our fiesta was seeing my mom read to my youngest. I love witnessing these moments!

Before the kids went home (after hours of hanging around reading, chatting and eating), I made sure that they were each signed up for the Scholastic Summer Reading program and that they each knew how to use the app to keep track of their minutes and achievements.

Each kid also received a certificate where they filled out their reading goal hours. They were so excited to have control over how much they were going to read. Of course, kids being kids, they each tried to top one another in the number of minutes that they could read. But hey… no complaints here!

Thanks to Scholastic and EVEREADY®, we also handed out some constellation charts that showed the kids what to expect later that evening when the stars came out.

By the time they went home, they had more than surpassed the recommended reading time of twenty minutes a day. Some of the kids even took a few books home to finish reading them there! We started our own little library system, which will work great throughout Summer to ensure that we have a new crop of books every so often.

Long after everyone went home, I could still see my youngest out in our patio reading under the stars. It was such a great day, and easy to recreate any day of the week thanks to Summer, books, EVEREADY® flashlights, a Reading Under the Stars invite… and stars.

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This is a sponsored post. All thoughts and ideas remain my own.

Originally published on July 10, 2014. Last Updated on August 9, 2017 by Pattie Cordova