This summer, the Queens Library will again launch its free Summer Reading program consisting of parties, games, prizes, crafts, films, performances, live online author chats and recreational reading.
Children and teens can register for free starting June 5 at any Queens Library location or at www.summerreading.org.
The theme this year is “Catch the Reading Bug,” so the recommended titles for third and fourth graders include How To Eat Fried Worms and Cockroach Cooties. Kids of all ages will read as many books as they can to complete “challenges” devised by the librarians themselves.
“In June, we will have arts and crafts to make costumes for a [Summer Reading] kick-off chess tournament. The last two winners will move live chess pieces - the rest of the [Summer Reading Club] kids will be the chess pieces,” Kenn Gordon, a Woodhaven children’s librarian told the Queens Library newsletter News & Notes.
Other activities include learning guitar or drums, writing a newspaper, playing Wii, drawing manga and learning chess. Summer readers from all five boroughs as well as those on vacation can post and read book reviews online.
PRE-K - K
To learn how to spell, read The Alphabet Tree and C D B! In Hondo & Fabian, have fun with Hondo the dog and Fabian the cat. Library lovers will enjoy Lola at the Library, in which a girl and her mother share stories. Read Manana, Iguana for a story about a very busy iguana.
GRADES 1 - 2
Go to the nearest air-conditioned library and relax with Oliver and Amanda: Amanda Pig and the Really Hot Day. In A Bad Case of Stripes, Camilla Cream catches a different kind of “bug.” Amuse your friends with The Bug in Teacher’s Coffee and Other School Poems. In Growing Frogs, a mother and child watch tadpoles become frogs. If you like mysteries (or grasshoppers), try Inspector Hopper.
GRADES 3 - 4
The classic Charlotte’s Web might have one of the best bug characters ever created. Cockroach Cooties is a story about a school bully who’s no match for Bobby’s pet cockroach. How to Eat Fried Worms is another book about one kid’s way of getting through a difficult task.
GRADES 5 - 6
All of the Above is the true story of the middle school students who built the world’s largest tetrahedron. In the historical novel Dovey Coe, a 12-year-old girl faces murder charges. Baseball enthusiasts should check out Heat, Penny From Heaven, and Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow.
TEENS
Graphic novel The Plain Janes tells the story of classmates whose art project turns their suburban town upside-down. In Copper Sun, a girl sold into slavery meets and escapes with an indentured servant. Anyone who wants to know what global warming really is should read Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming. Chew on This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food exposes the fast food industry. Direct poet enthusiasts to Blue Lipstick: Concrete Poems, which includes a girl’s poems to her cat. Marvel at Aron Ralston’s fortitude in his memoir Between a Rock and a Hard Place.
