Surprise Adventure: Half-Price Books and Summer Reading

We walked up the bookstore and found the sidewalks decorated for the occasion.

My family LOVES Half Price Books. They have books, comics, music, even board games. And they buy books back too. You may not get much for them, but I like knowing that someone else will be able to come in and buy that title for half the retail price also. Books deserve good homes too, after all. We often go to wander the aisles.

We went on a recent buying trip to the store  just before our journey to Utah and we stumbled onto their summer reading program for kids. If your child reads (or you read to them) a total of 300 minutes in the month of June or July and turn the little tracking paper back in, then the store will give them $5 in Half Price Books Bucks.  That’s only 15 minutes a day if you split it up evenly.

My children always do the Library’s Summer Reading program anyways. With just the little bit of effort it takes to record their reading in two places instead of one, they can end up getting $10 in free books ($5 for June and $5 for July) as well as finish the Library program.

At this point, Gabe and Max have already read over 300 minutes in June, so we swung by the store today to turn in our papers. The sad news was that they do not get the Half Price Bucks in until July 1st. The good news was that we had stumbled onto their Summer Solstice celebration.

I knew we didn’t have a ton of time until we needed to pick Scarlet up from Girl’s Camp, but we couldn’t pass up the opportunity for some summer fun! And at my favorite price- FREE! Below are some pictures of the boys enjoying the store’s offerings. We had a fun time.  I encourage all y’all to check the store and the kids’ summer reading program out.

Gabe scoffed this game as being too easy until he saw how hard his brother had to try to get that little hook into the little loop on top of the duck’s head. Then he had to prove that he could conquer it as well. The number on the bottom was how many tickets you got.

The boys playing different carnival games at the same time. Max bested Gabe in two of the games, but Gabe took it well.

Gabe and Max pick prizes based on how many ticket they each got. All the prizes were book based.

Right as we were leaving, the boys figured out that this goodie table was also free. They actually jumped for joy when they saw mini gatorades.