Summer reading challenges are a great way to keep kids busy and limit screen time during the summer without constantly hearing, “I’m bored!”. But what do you do when they start out growing the library’s challenges or they don’t want to go to the local library? You do a summer reading challenge bingo!
If you have voracious readers, want to encourage reading and make the challenges more fun and interactive, then join me as I show you how to do a summer reading challenge bingo. You’ll be able to click the challenge link lower in the post and utilize my challenge as is or personalize it and make it your own.
Local Library
I started taking my bonus kids to our local library over seven years ago when they were home for the summer. This was even before some of them were in school. While libraries have some controversy around them these days, you can use your discernment to pick out quality books and they’re a wonderful free resource for the community.
I’m all for using the library as a way to save money and keep kids occupied!
Now that our biggest three kids are entering 5th, 6th and 9th grade, stickers and buttons don’t really cut it for them as reading prizes. Plus they blow right through the challenges of reading 100, 200 and 500 pages.
This might not be where your kids are, and that’s okay. Just start where you are.
Combining the Library’s Challenge With Your Own
In past years, we made our own challenge each year. The way this reading challenge worked, was that in addition to the library’s challenge, we had prizes for the kids at 500 pages, 1,000 pages, 1,500 pages and even 2,000 pages! Not all of them hit 2,000 but they did all hit 1,500 in recent years. When you set the bar high they’ll reach further than if they set it low.
Depending on the ages of your kids, these page amounts may not be appropriate for them. If that is the case, simply adjust the levels down! After all, this is customizable and should be for your own kids. Our first year I think we did increments of 250 pages.
We typically run our challenge as soon as school is out through the end of August. This year we’re making ours go Memorial Day to Labor Day. If you’re reading this after those dates, that’s okay! It’s never too late to start.
Reading Challenge Bingo
Our kids get excited about being able to have better prizes to work for and they’ll do the work! It’s fun as a bonus mama to see them joyfully pursue something besides screens and be invested in the challenge.
We’ve always had them help pick prizes and suggested some parameters.
This year with everyone getting older, we decided to make the challenge a bingo game so they could help pick the challenge squares. When you involve the kids, they’re much more invested in the project.
While driving home from school, we simply discussed and came up with challenge ideas. My soon to be 6th grader put them in the notes section of my phone while I drove and we chatted. Later on I created the challenge on Canva.
You can access my editable Canva template here or click the image to get the .PNG image to download. You’ll need a free Canva account to access the template.
Reading Challenge Bingo Prize Ideas
The prize system is pretty simple for the reading challenge bingo. For each bingo, the kids achieve, they will receive a prize. When they achieve a ‘blackout’ they’ll get an even larger prize. I’m also not above paying our kids to read. They’re excited about money and if they’ve read multiple books in the summer, a $5 cash prize makes their little hearts happy and it’s a drop in the bucket.
Here are some ideas of what you can do for prizes based on what we’ve done in past years and some we will do this year.
Smaller Prize Ideas:
- Go for ice cream
- $5
- $10
- Buy A New Book
- Go to the movies
- Picnic at the park with a special treat
- Staying up 30 min late to play or watch a movie
- Staying up 1 hour later to play or watch a movie
- Have a sleepover
- Family ice cream outing
- Go to the pool
- Play at a local watering hole and picnic
- Going for a shaved ice
Larger Prizes
We save the larger prizes for a high level of challenge completion such as when kids read 1,500 words or in the case of the reading challenge bingo, when the entire board is filled and they achieve a blackout.
Here are some of the large prize ideas:
- A family date such as a day at the waterpark
- Bowling
- Go to an amusement park
- Find something local in your area on Groupon
The large prize items can be made affordable by shopping around for deals. Years past we might do movies at a discount on Tuesdays for $5 or go to a second run theatre. Same thing for bowling. We go on a discounted night such as a Monday or Tuesday when there’s less business and there’s a discount or deal.
Prizes such as family outings, we wait until everyone has achieved that level or for this year, that particular bingo has been achieved, and then we go as a group.
Reading Challenge Bingo Prizes
For this year since we aren’t achieving levels and the kids could all earn their first, second, third etc.. bingo a different way, we’ll do our prizes based off bingos. Since the kids can earn 10 bingos if they get one for each row across and down, I’m keeping the prizes reasonable so that cost and time don’t get out of hand.
The challenge is harder this year than previous years. With the reading challenge bingo, the kids have to do more to earn multiple bingos. My husband and I are happy to reward and encourage reading, so we’ll spend money on something like this, but keep some of those bigger prizes towards the end so the kids really have to work for them.
Here are the prizes we are doing for each Summer Reading Challenge Bingo:
- Stay up an extra hour late
- Pick out a junk food such as chips or candy of their choice ( I don’t let the type of stuff in the house so it is a treat for us).
- Cake pop at starbucks
- Swimming
- Going out for ice cream
- $5
- Dinner of your choice
- Go to the movies
- Pick a Day to skip out on chores
- Buy a new book
The Blackout Prize For the Summer Reading Challenge Bingo is a family date! This year it’ll be a water park, other years it’s been a family fun center with a small-ish water park and arcade.
I hope you’ve found these ideas helpful! As with anything, modify it to fit your family’s needs! You may need easier or harder reading challenges, make changes to the bingo. You may have more or less budget for prizes than we do so modify it based on what your kids are excited about and what fits your budget.
So let’s get reading!