A summer reading log is a chore with a chart attached. A passport is the same information in a form a seven-year-old will carry around in a backpack, and that difference is most of whether it gets used.
It takes about twenty minutes to make and it lasts the whole summer. Here is the whole thing.
Make the booklet
You need three sheets of letter paper and a stapler. That is genuinely it.
- Stack three sheets and fold the stack in half, short edge to short edge. You now have a twelve-page booklet at 5.5 x 8.5 inches.
- Staple twice along the fold, about an inch and a half in from each end.
- Cover: the child writes their name, draws a photo of themselves in the box, and titles it. Let them do this part entirely. A passport somebody else made is a worksheet.
- Page 1: name, age, "reader since," and a signature line. The signature line matters far more than it should.
- Pages 2 to 11: four stamp boxes per page, drawn as squares with a line underneath for the title.
- Back page: the destination list, so they can see where they have not been yet.
Forty boxes over ten pages is right for a summer. Enough that it is not finished in week two, few enough that finishing is possible.
Twenty destinations
Each destination is a kind of book. A book fills one box, even when it fits three.
| Destination | Counts as |
|---|---|
| The Deep Sea | A book about the ocean or something that lives in it |
| Outer Space | Space, planets, astronauts |
| The Past | Set before your grandparents were born |
| The Future | Set in a time that has not happened |
| The Jungle | Any book with a wild animal in it |
| A Real Place | A country you could find on a map |
| Somewhere Made Up | A world that does not exist |
| The Library | A book you chose off the shelf yourself |
| Grandma’s House | A book an adult in your family loved as a kid |
| The Kitchen | A recipe you read and cooked |
| The Night Sky | A book read outside after dark |
| The Long Road | A book read in a car, a plane or a train |
| The Laugh Track | A book that made you laugh out loud |
| The Waterworks | A book that made you sad |
| The Museum | A true book about a real person |
| The Workshop | A book that taught you how to do something |
| The Reading Room | A book you read to someone else |
| The Bunk Bed | A book someone read to you |
| The Rerun | A book you have read before |
| The Mystery Stop | A book you picked with your eyes closed |
Twenty destinations, forty boxes — so most can be visited twice. Repeat visits are allowed and encouraged; a child who reads six ocean books has found something they love, which is the actual goal.
The stamps
The stamp is the part that makes it work, and it needs to be something the child cannot do for themselves. Four options, in order of how well they hold up:
A rubber stamp and ink pad. Best by a distance. It feels official, it is fast, and the sound of it is half the pleasure. Any stamp will do — a star, a bird, anything.
Stickers. One per box, applied by an adult. Works well, and a set of die cut stickers that repeats across the summer looks better in a finished passport than twenty different ones.
A signature and a date. Free, and it turns you into the border official, which children enjoy more than you would expect.
Washi tape corner. A torn piece across one corner of the box. Fast, and it looks good when the page fills up.
Whichever you pick, be consistent and be slightly ceremonial about it. Stamping should take ten seconds and involve looking at the book title and saying it out loud.
The rules
- Being read to counts. Non-negotiable. A five-year-old is a reader.
- Audiobooks count. Same.
- Abandoned books count if you got a good way in. Stopping a book you do not like is a skill.
- One book, one stamp. Even if it fits four destinations.
- No minimum length. A picture book is a book. Comparing page counts between siblings ends the whole thing.
- The passport goes in the bag. It travels. That is the point of the format.
- No prize at the end. Or a very small one. A prize turns it into a task and the stamping stops being the reward.
Wide age gaps
The most common problem with a family reading challenge. Three things that fix it:
Same destinations, different books. A four-year-old and an eleven-year-old can both visit The Deep Sea. Nobody is doing an easier version.
Do not compare box counts. Passports are personal. Do not put them side by side on the fridge.
Give the older one a job. The Reading Room destination — a book read to someone else — is what makes an eleven-year-old part of a little kid’s summer rather than embarrassed by the whole exercise.
For what to expect at each age, reading logs by age has the realistic numbers.
What to do in September
Do not throw it away and do not start a new one immediately. Sit down once and look through it together: which destination got the most stamps, which never got visited, what the best book was.
Then put it somewhere it will be found again. A finished passport is a record of a specific summer, and children reread their own.
If it worked, the natural next step for an older child is a proper reading journal — how to set it up covers the spreads worth having — or a reading log notepad, which is the same idea with a grown-up format.
Make it this weekend
Three sheets, one fold, two staples. Let them draw the cover, write the destination list on the back page together, and stamp the first box for whatever they are already reading.
For the stamps, stickers and tape, see sticker sheets, die cuts and washi tape.