What an unusual – even heroic – thing it is for a Fast Food chain to do in this digital day and age… The Pizza Hut Book It! summer reading incentive program is back for it’s 40th year! And they’re still giving away free pies…
It’s hard to believe that the Pizza Hut Book It! reading incentive program has been run every summer for 40 years. How many thousands of kids have benefited from the Hut’s aggressive push to get them to read over the summer holidays?
High-profile push
The Hut gives kids a push every summer – either through their teachers, or direct to home schoolers – to read as many books as they can. The ‘carrot’ dangled ahead of this ‘horse’ is a free Personal Pan Pizza for every monthly reading goal a kid reaches.
Run by Every Child A Reader, it’s part of a larger, year-round campaign, “…encouraging reading in schools nationwide. This work is more than just a corporate mission, it’s a personal challenge to turn ‘have to read’ into ‘want to read’, and our time-tested incentives work. BOOK IT! is the largest and longest-running corporate supported reading program, and now the program is inspiring the second generation of program alumni.”
How BOOK IT! Works
Per the Every Child A Reader website:
- Simple: Set a reading goal for each child in your class from October through March. When they meet their monthly goal, you get to recognize them with a Reading Award Certificate, good for a free one-topping Personal Pan Pizza.
- Flexible: You can set goals based on your students’ reading ability. Number of books, number of pages or number of minutes – they all work! For children not reading independently, you can set a goal where their parent or others read to them.
- Fun: When your students redeem their Reading Award Certificate at Pizza Hut, we celebrate right along with them and reward students with a free, one-topping Personal Pan Pizza, a prize and a sticker for each month they achieve their goal.
- Free: Best of all, BOOK IT! materials are always free to schools!
A fundamental skill
Computers and online resources are being being incorporated into mainstream school programs more and more every year. And the wealth of resources online is also multiplying.
Reading remains a fundamental skill every kid needs to master to get along in the world. Even if a child is already substantially a ‘digital world dweller’ by the age of 10, it takes fairly reading skills to get the most from the screen sources they are now able to access. Or should we say, ‘especially if…’?
My take
Now, before the end of the school year, is the best time to register kids for the Book It! summer reading program.
Perfect partners!
Book It! appears to me to be a perfect partner in a kid’s life to the new push to bring back teaching cursive writing (traditional longhand) in schools. Most schools dumped traditional handwriting skills in favour of elementary printing more than a decade ago. The notion was, it was closer to the screen- and keyboard-based reality the kids of the day were growing up with.
But it’s been discovered that the teaching cursive writing gives kids a much richer overall learning experience than just printing or keying. In particular, learning and practicing cursive results in a much-enhanced knowledge and appreciation of the language, and all the social and cultural skills related to it.
And now… Many school systems are bring back mandatory cursive instruction. The Book It! program isn’t mandatory by any means. But it does address the same critical issues as the new emphasis on cursive writing – just from the input side, rather than the output side…
My questions to you:
Do you approve of the reintroduction of cursive writing instruction in schools?
Do you approve of the Book It! program?
Do you feel – as I do – that Pizza Hut deserves greater recognition for its leading role in the Book It! program?
Muse on that!
~ Maggie J.