The Summer of 100 Books

For the past few months, Stenni has been asking me to read her 5 books every time she goes on the potty. This used to be more doable, as she read shorter books and spent more minutes on the potty each sitting...and she didn't count all the books, so sometimes I could fudge it.  Now that potty training is in the home stretch (meaning that she usually just gets on the potty to do her business, and that's it), we have less quality reading time than we used to. I'm happy not to have to sit in front of her on the bathroom floor for half an hour at a time, but I need to find a new way to incorporate more reading into our everyday routine again. Therefore we are declaring this summer:

The Summer of 100 Books!

Between May 28th (the day after Memorial Day) and September 1st (the day before Labor day) there are 97 days, including all holidays and weekends. That means that all we have to do to meet this totally attainable goal is read a book a day, with 3 extra thrown in there for good measure as time allows. Here's the catch: I'm only counting each book once, which means that as many times as I read I Love You, Stinky Face or Put Me in the Zoo, they count only once towards the 100 book goal. And at the end of the summer we will be making our own book based on our summer experiences, since we'll have a whole new appreciation of books and reading! Plus, I'll report all of the books to you in order to keep us fully accountable!

This is all in conjunction with our very experimental home-preschooling, and will be tied into summer experiences and trips (we will read about the beach in preparation for our trip to the shore, for example, and read about gardening while tending to our garden). I'm hoping that this will help us in our goal, which is to move towards some very basic independent reading within in next year or so (really, everything we do at home is working towards that end, and it might sound lofty, but reading is something we really love in this house). Stenni is already identifying each letter of the alphabet and the sounds that they make, and can sight-read some words like her name, mama and papa, and a few others. Our attempts to write, trace, or copy letters so far have not worked out as well as I'd like, but I figure we'll chock that up to needing some more work on small motor skills, and the fact that she's 2 1/2, so I'm not going to totally push it too hard just yet. There's always more time. 

Anyone out there want to take the "Summer of 100 Books" challenge with us? Comment, and we'll synchronize our efforts! Here's to a fruitful summer!