All-Star Summer Readers Meet Yankees Star At Stadium
NEW YORK (CBS 2) -- Some amazing area kids spent the summer of 2010 reading up a storm, and for all that hard work, they headed to Yankee Stadium to hang out with the player everyone's talking about.
Curtis Granderson drilled two home runs into the stands on Thursday, and he wasn't even in the starting lineup. Right before the game, though, he met some all-star readers who blew him away, reports CBS 2's Cindy Hsu.
"Where I was reading maybe five or six books in maybe a week or a month, one girl out there said she reads five to six in a day," Granderson said.
The nine kids read more than 1,200 books combined though the New York Public Library Summer Reading Program.
"I read over 325 books," 14-year-old Brittany Lopez said. "Every day, I went home and read books. I barely watched any TV, and every morning I'd go to the library, if possible."
Christian Rosario is seven years old, and says his family's love of reading helped him get through 60 books.
Jack Martin runs the program, and he says parents should be reading aloud with their kids for at least 20 minutes each day. He says the key is to find their passion.
"It could be anything from the latest, hot vampire novels to Sports Illustrated to reading the New York Times online," Martin said.
Local libraries say parents have to keep encouraging their kids to read, because when the homework load gets crazy in middle school, the love of reading for fun starts to suffer.
"At the library, we tend to see reading dropping off at seventh, eighth and ninth grade," Martin said.
The kids say whether it's baseball or books, when they see their parents enjoying something, that's what they often fall in love with.
To get your kids excited about reading, you can get some great library lists of books for all ages when you click here.
