If you’re bored and you don’t want to go outside in the summer heat, Maricopa County is offering a fun program that encourages the art of reading.
The Maricopa County Reads program, which runs from June 1 to Aug. 1, encourages people of all ages to read at least 20 minutes a day. For every minute of reading, participants get one point. The more points you have, the better prizes that you are eligible for. Points and scores are tracked via public library systems across the county, including in Mesa and Tempe.
Prizes vary from something as simple as a bookmark or sticker to something as extravagant as a Harkins gift card or Phoenix Mercury tickets.
“At 250 points you get a small prize of a bookmark and sticker. At 500 points you start getting vouchers for free food and beverages from places like Raisin’ Canes or Peter Piper Pizza,” Mesa Public Library Marketing Specialist Sarah Lipich said. “At 1,000 points, you get to choose a free book from a large list of options to help you build your home library, and you also get entered into raffles.”
Raffles can earn you some of the more valuable or highly coveted prizes mentioned earlier. The 1,000 points is the ultimate goal for all participants, and the promise of the raffle acts as a motivator to get them there.
This program was originally created to help prevent the “summer slide” in student readers, a phenomena where students often forget or lose hold of information they learned during the school year over summer break. Reading is a good way to counteract the summer slide.
“The summer slide is learning loss that kids can experience over the summer if they don’t keep their minds engaged,” Lipich said. “Just reading five books over the summer helps them retain that information and keep their minds engaged.”
However, this program is open to all ages to participate. That’s partially because public libraries serve everyone so they would not exclude adults, but it also provides a model of good behavior for young kids if they see their parents in the reading program too. Teaching kids the importance of reading at a young age can have a big impact on their education, according to Maricopa County Library District Communications Advisor Samantha Mears.
“Something really important about early literacy with kids is modeling. You want your kids to see you reading,” Mears said. “Making this program so where a mom can participate as well as a dad and a grandparent is very important to establishing that habit of reading because you want your kid to be modeling what you want to see.”
The theme for this year’s campaign is “Color Our World.” According to Tempe Public Library Director Jessica Jupitus, this theme is all about the visual aspect of reading, which is being implemented into the program. The Tempe Public Library is using a wall in the youth area to illustrate this theme by letting every kid who gets 1,000 points put a paint splotch on said wall with their name on it.
“Pretty much everything colors your world, right?” Jupitus said. “You read something or you listen to something. Whatever your experience is, it makes your world a little bit more colorful. So that’s what we’re trying to emphasize.”
Since the Maricopa County Library District is funded through a special tax connected to property taxes, any resources provided would go out to all library systems in the county that are connected to the district. This would include the Maricopa County Reads program. However, a united community of readers across the whole of Maricopa County only further helps the program shine.
“Having a unified program where we’re all behind the same message is gonna make for a more successful program,” Mears said. “We’re gonna get more participants and more engagement when we’re all working together toward the same goal.”
Overall, Jupitus hopes that people can find or rediscover their joy for reading as a result of this program.
“I hope people find that they discover something that they love that they never would have known, and that they connect with their community,” Jupitus said. “They find each other, or they find themselves, or they find it through the library.”
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