Chels

If you’re in your 20s or 30s in the UK, you might remember the Summer Reading Challenge. I still think about it, 15 years since I was last eligible to take part.

If you don’t know what the challenge is – it’s a library based initiative to encourage children aged 4-11 to read for pleasure during the big school holidays. You can sign up at your local library to be given a challenge card and receive a stamp or sticker for each book that you read, with prizes for reaching a certain number of books. In retrospect, I probably wasn’t the child that the challenge was aimed at – even without an incentive, I’d spend a lot of my time in the school holidays reading books. Without school getting in the way, I could easily devour at least a book a week. Still, the incentive was nice.

The challenge that I remember most was 2008’s – it was Olympic themed, and one of the prizes was a little yellow stretchy man. It sounds silly, but I distinctly remember our school holding an assembly, as they often did, to encourage us to sign up for the challenge, and everyone wanted to earn the Mr Stretchy Man, as he became known. 

Aside from my own nostalgia for the challenge, I’m so glad to see it has continued. In an age where very few children read for pleasure, when literacy rates among children and adults are decreasing, programmes like the summer reading challenge are so important for children. Even if the challenge only serves to introduce children to the library, being aware that books can be borrowed and read for free can greatly impact the lives of children who are interested in reading but don’t have the same access to books, and the incentives and prizes act as a push for children who are apprehensive about reading. 

The challenge has always stated that any books count – so children whose reading age is lower than expected still get to participate the same way as their peers, as opposed to reading within school, which can sometimes ostracise students both above and below the expected level. Children who do read above their expected level can also read adult or young adult novels to challenge their reading – it can be entirely tailored to the individual child.

The challenge is even available online now – with flexible reading goals set by the child or the parent (though prizes are limited to in person participants). Even the reading challenge has become more accessible. Since this year’s challenge started on June 20th, over 2.3 million books have already been logged by young readers.

In fact, my only criticism of the summer reading challenge is that I’m no longer eligible to participate. I loved watching my challenge card fill up with each book that I finished (I also loved my Mr Stretchy Man). We started our cousins’ yearly reading challenge after ageing out of the official summer reading challenge, and as much as I love the competitive side of our challenge, I do miss having a pretty challenge card with a theme that I could fill with stamps.

In an attempt to save my somewhat disastrous reading year so far (I’m ashamed to have only read six books in six months), I’ve created my own summer reading challenge card. It’s not a physical card, because our printer is on strike, but I created a template on Canva that I can use as motivation over the summer. I hope that the presence of pretty colours and stamp graphics (and a prize I’ve yet to decide on) will encourage me to read once I’ve finished my last session of the year as a tutor.

If you’d like to join in with my summer reading challenge, you can download the PDF here, and, if you have a child aged 4-11 in the UK, you can sign them up for the challenge, in person at your local library, or online.