Did you have BOOK IT! when you were in grade school? I remember the pins with stickers on them. I would read like crazy to get those free personal pan pizza coupons in elementary school. I don't know if they had it down here though, I went to school in NY. I wonder if those pins are in a box packed away somewhere back home...

12/30/2009 12:05:34 AM

Yep. Loved those free personal pan pizzas.

12/30/2009 12:11:41 AM

Do they still do Book It!

My parents were against Pizza Hut so even if I did get a free pizza, I would just end up giving the coupon to a friend

12/30/2009 12:46:44 AM

yeah my brother and i did that every year. i hated the pizzas because they had shit tons of sauce so i just gave the coupon away.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=pizza+hut+book+it

[Edited on December 30, 2009 at 8:51 AM. Reason : ]

12/30/2009 8:51:08 AM

This may have something to do with why our generation is so fat.

12/30/2009 9:13:01 AM

In the 7th grade my teacher made us do Book It!. She rationalized it by saying that we could choose any number of books we wanted for our goal. I, naturally, signed a pledge to read zero books per month to claim my free pizza. Well, the teacher wasn't having it. When I brought up the fact that it was her idea to let us pick the number of books she responded with anger. I don't know what is up with old white women being so full of anger, but they'll just let loose over nothing. In any case, I end up being forced to read 1 book per month and, to make matters worse, it gets counted as a homework assignment.

Fast forward 29 days. Our Book It! contract is about to expire and I still haven't read a book. I go to the bookshelf in my parents' home and can only find one book suitable for reading in less than one hour. It was "Truly Tasteless Jokes". This book was the bane of the PC Populace in the 80's. Most of the Helen Keller jokes, dead baby jokes, and racist jokes that you have heard, laughed at, and ultimately been disgusted by the fact that you laughed originated in this book. I finished the book in good time and took my pledge sheet to my mom to have her sign off on my achievement.

As usual, anger ensued. We argued long and hard about the fact that there was no time left to read another book and my grades were bad enough as it was. There may have been some crying, but ultimately she signed it as if she were signing away the last vestige of being a proper PTA parent.

The pizza was delicious.

12/30/2009 12:56:08 PM

^ that's a great story!

We had book-it in eastern NC and I LOVED the pizza parties at the end of the year... I would stuff my belly so full of pizza that it would actually be hard for me to take a deep breath

[Edited on December 30, 2009 at 2:56 PM. Reason : s]

12/30/2009 2:56:08 PM

We had book it down in Florida when I was in elementary school. Great program that seemed to work well with the other kids I had class with. Now days kids don't even know what books are.





[Edited on December 30, 2009 at 3:48 PM. Reason : df]

12/30/2009 3:47:00 PM

Quote :

""Truly Tasteless Jokes""

Holy shit I'd forgotten about those books! I remember most of the jokes in the book I had being hilarious (for a middle schooler at the time). The one I remember the most was a joke about why you shouldn't get an autograph from Ray Charles, and the next page had his "signature" with half of his name on one side of the page, and scribbled like a 4 year old wrote it.

12/30/2009 3:57:31 PM

appropriate ad at the top

12/30/2009 6:02:25 PM

^^^
I was in Tampa, FL growing up and I remember this. I always played the rule of "if you FIND the book in a library, it counts, nevermind actually reading it" .

This would probably be easy to do these days. Damn youngins with their internet accessible electronic card catalogs...

12/30/2009 8:00:21 PM

BOOK

IT

POINTS

12/31/2009 12:12:32 AM

BOOK IT!


fuck, i ate so much free pizza with this club. I love book it. amazing!

12/31/2009 1:35:34 AM

it was a sham

the personal pan pizzas sucked and they wouldn't let you upgrade. i offered to read 3 times as much for a real pizza- they said no

12/31/2009 8:07:17 AM

We had it ourselves here.

12/31/2009 10:47:46 AM

I loved that program and the Pizza. I read the most out of all students in k-2 @ Effie Green Elementary...if I still remember that correctly.

1/2/2010 2:32:38 AM

if adult book it existed, i would probably read more books.

1/11/2010 12:15:33 AM

I got a personal pan pizza once a month during elementary school because of this.

Also, Skack, that is a for-the-win story, sir.

1/11/2010 1:12:46 AM

I also did BOOK IT!

1/11/2010 9:42:31 AM

Book It! is the reason I got fat as a child.

1/11/2010 9:48:48 AM

Book It! ftw

[Edited on January 11, 2010 at 10:16 AM. Reason : ]

1/11/2010 10:16:08 AM

I remember having the blue Book-It badge, that you applied little gold stars to in order to get a pizza.

1/11/2010 4:19:18 PM

i did this, and i didn't even like pizza.

hell, i would've read even if they hadn't bribed me with anything...

1/11/2010 7:34:05 PM

me too... I read probably 3-4 books a month as a kid anyway. was basically a free pizza program for me

1/11/2010 9:24:55 PM

Quote :

"My parents were against Pizza Hut so even if I did get a free pizza, I would just end up giving the coupon to a friend"

wow your childhood must have been a blast....

1/12/2010 1:04:47 PM

I remember doing this a few times.

1/12/2010 11:43:17 PM

^^ heh, I don't really blame my parents. Why eat shitty, overprocessed, pizza when you can go to a local place and get a pizza that isn't 50% chemicals at best.

1/13/2010 6:36:59 AM

Quote :

"Did you have BOOK IT! when you were in grade school?"

Oh man! I had forgotten about this part of my life! Yeah, I pledged like 2 books a month or something low like that. I thoroughly enjoyed those pizzas as well. MMMM...

1/13/2010 6:54:00 AM

I was jsut talking about this w/ someone a couple days ago. It was awesome!

1/13/2010 7:44:11 AM

Quote :

"if adult book it existed, i would probably read more books."

1/13/2010 5:42:21 PM

Instead of a free personal pan pizza you would get a free veggie burger!

1/17/2010 8:28:54 PM

They still do Book It...at least they did last year when I was still teaching (5th grade).

1/29/2010 11:59:05 AM

We had it in western NC too, it was great. Did anybody else have the Accelerated Reader thing? I don't remember what the prizes were, but you'd read a book then take a quiz about it and get so many points depending on the book and how well you did.

4/6/2010 3:54:30 PM

^ yep I did that.

4/6/2010 6:04:32 PM

^^i did accelerated reader in elementary school. i think i was consistently on the upper end when it came to points. as i recall, having the most points was just about the only prize, but i've never needed incentive to read

4/6/2010 7:15:18 PM

Like I said I can't remember any specific incentives but I always remember being extremely competitive about it. I had the most every year I was there, but like you said I never needed it as an incentive.

Edit:
Ohhhhhhh, I remember now. The prizes were given by the teachers, not from the program itself. I can't remember all of them but I remember with so many points we could get a "free" day, where you didn't have to go to your class, you could do whatever (within reason, of course). Typically it was being any teacher's assistant, staying in the library, playing on the computers in the lab, stuff like that.

[Edited on April 7, 2010 at 3:46 PM. Reason : ^]

4/7/2010 3:43:05 PM

BOOK IT FTW!

IIRC, it's how I was able to get these radical shades

4/7/2010 10:12:06 PM

I will admit that I earned a pizza or two without reading anything more than the title of the book. Call it lazy, or call it ingenious.

4/26/2010 3:08:47 AM

I didn't even know what this was as a kid. Man I missed out.

[Edited on April 26, 2010 at 8:20 AM. Reason : http://www.bookitprogram.com/]

4/26/2010 8:20:17 AM