Hello Readathon Friends!!!!
This is Kate, from Kate’s Book Nook. If you’ve been around for a while, you might recognize me as the co-host of the final few hours of the readathon for goodness knows how many years now. What you may or may not know is that additionally, I am the founder and moderator of both the Goodreads Group and the Facebook Group for Dewey’s 24 Hour Read-a-Thon (and if you didn’t know about those groups, I highly recommend joining them! They are both a lot of fun, not only during the readathon itself, but throughout the readathon and in the weeks leading up to each readathon).
Over the last month in order to get in the spirit and to get enthusiasm going, Gabby (Goodreads co-moderator extraordinaire) and I have hosted three week long BINGO reading challenges. They have been a lot of fun! This year, Gabby and I decided that we would host a day of the Read-a-Thon BINGO event. We have come up with 24 different challenges and activities that are all related to various aspects of the Read-A-Thon. They range from reading books with certain requirements to eating a snack or cheering on other readers. Yesterday we posted the BINGO board on the Goodreads Group and we would love for anyone and everyone to participate with us. We tried to keep things as generic as possible so that everyone could easily fit their books into the challenge. You can find the BINGO board here.
While getting an ordinary 5 in a row will mean that you’ve completed your bingo, as an additional incentive to really challenge yourself, I am offering a $10 gift certificate to Better World Books. Better World Books has free World Wide Shipping and so this prize is open to everyone, both in the United States and to those around the World. I personally have family members who participate outside of the United States. This amazing website helps raise money for literacy and they donate many books. They have donated over 26 million books and raised over 28 million dollars for literacy and libraries. So not only do you get an amazing deal and free shipping, but you also support literacy causes and library funding 🙂
To be eligible for this prize, all you have to do is complete the BINGO blackout (do all the required activities during the Read-A-Thon event) and then post a completion on the Goodreads completion thread found here (though I suppose if you don’t have Goodreads and you still want to participate, you can post your completion here). I know that many families participate, so if you have a child participating in the readathon and you think they would enjoy participating in the BINGO event, you can feel free to adapt the challenges to make them more child appropriate goals. Each child that completes the blackout can be eligible for the prize, parent permission permitting.
In addition, if you have any questions or need a clarification or a reason you can’t complete something, Gabby and I are more than happy to answer questions or adapt a challenge to make it something you can do. For example, one of the members on the group does not do social media and was unsure how to complete that task. So in we made the exception that if she made a reading update on Goodreads, she could just use the #readathon on her book update and would thus fulfill that BINGO square.
I really hope that some of you all will join us in this even as the more people who participate, the more fun it will be. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me and I will be happy to answer them.
Happy reading and good luck in your final few hours of preparing for Readathon!
Kate 🙂
Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon 