Kids Summer Reading Incentives

I love shopping for summer reading incentive prizes. Though this year I felt guilty about just giving away cheapie plastic stuff that will just take up space in the world so I tried to lean more towards useful prizes instead of pieces that will just break.

Oriental Trading is a great place to buy prizes. I have lived and learned what not to buy because often the quality of items is pretty low. This year I think I did a pretty rad shopping job if I do say so myself.

The way I run our summer reading for kids is children keep track of how many minutes they read or are read to. For every 15 minutes they read they can place a sticker on their reading chart. After a child gets 10 stickers (2.5 hours of reading) they can pick a prize from the prize box. Some kids come every week to get a prize and some only collect huge payloads once or twice over the summer. I put new prizes in the box each week with the prizes getting progressively better as the summer goes on.

Here are the prizes I offered this summer:

Oriental Wooden Bookmarks (not a big hit)
Oriental Wooden Fans (huge hit)
Stuffed Panda Bears (big hit)
Skateboard and Truck Erasers (hit)
Stackable Pencils and Adjustable Erasers (surprising hit)
Metal Skull Rings and Plastic Animal Print Rings (boys and girls love)
Parachute Monkeys (leftover from last year, still a hit)
Frog Finger Puppets (popular with toddlers)
Eye Bulge Critters (squeeze them and their eyes bug out, kids loved this)
Rainbow Crayons (not a huge hit, come on kids these are awesome!)

Waterguns (moderate hit)
Knight and Alien Rubber Duckies (they love the twist on traditional rubber duckies)
Glitter Stickers (moderate in popularity)
Country Flag Keychains (duds)
Sports Necklaces (popular)
Chinese Characters Wooden Bead Bracelet (okay, not as popular as I thought)