I can still picture my prized holographic BOOK IT! pin, the one with pages that turned as you tilted it. It filled up with stars I earned through a full Baby-Sitters Club obsession and anything even remotely ghost-related, then kicked around various jewelry boxes and bins of ephemera for years. As a kid I proudly identified as a voracious reader, and the pin was the proof. The Pizza Hut pizza was simply a bonus.
Recently, I sat down to talk with Chrissy Teigen about her partnership with Pizza Hut's BOOK IT! program, and it quickly turned into a delightful nostalgia-fest. What doubly delighted me was how authentically excited she is about reading and about passing that love down to her kids. "The little exclamation point is like what excited me the most," she told me about her own childhood pin, and we were off.
There's real substance behind the nostalgia. Pizza Hut created BOOK IT! in 1984 with a simple mission, to turn "have to read" into "want to read" for kids everywhere, and it worked. It's now the longest-running corporate-supported reading program in the country, and by Pizza Hut's own count it has encouraged more than 70 million children to read since it launched, handing out an estimated 1.5 billion pizzas along the way.
Teigen, who turned 40 this year, has spent the past few years reconnecting with her childhood friends from Snohomish, Washington. The things that got them excited as kids are the same things they text each other about now, which is exactly why a reading program wrapped in 90s vibes and pizza was an immediate yes. As a senior millennial, I understood the impulse completely.
Her four kids read in four completely different ways, which any parent of more than one totally understands. Miles (8), her biggest reader, goes nonstop, plowing through Dog Man and the I Survived series in the car and on the way to camp because he loves facts more than almost anything. Luna (10), her oldest, is aging into book reports, summer reading lists, and the very specific social world of tween reading, where friends race through the same book so they can all watch the adaptation together. Then there are the littles. Esti (3) is deep in Madeline and The Very Impatient Caterpillar, which Teigen reads aloud in full character voices while the caterpillar keeps asking "am I a **** erfly yet?" and everyone shouts back, no. Wren (3), whom she affectionately calls "a much simpler man," wants Little Blue Truck and a "beep beep" on every page.
#reading #teigen #little #caterpillar
Recently, I sat down to talk with Chrissy Teigen about her partnership with Pizza Hut's BOOK IT! program, and it quickly turned into a delightful nostalgia-fest. What doubly delighted me was how authentically excited she is about reading and about passing that love down to her kids. "The little exclamation point is like what excited me the most," she told me about her own childhood pin, and we were off.
There's real substance behind the nostalgia. Pizza Hut created BOOK IT! in 1984 with a simple mission, to turn "have to read" into "want to read" for kids everywhere, and it worked. It's now the longest-running corporate-supported reading program in the country, and by Pizza Hut's own count it has encouraged more than 70 million children to read since it launched, handing out an estimated 1.5 billion pizzas along the way.
Teigen, who turned 40 this year, has spent the past few years reconnecting with her childhood friends from Snohomish, Washington. The things that got them excited as kids are the same things they text each other about now, which is exactly why a reading program wrapped in 90s vibes and pizza was an immediate yes. As a senior millennial, I understood the impulse completely.
Her four kids read in four completely different ways, which any parent of more than one totally understands. Miles (8), her biggest reader, goes nonstop, plowing through Dog Man and the I Survived series in the car and on the way to camp because he loves facts more than almost anything. Luna (10), her oldest, is aging into book reports, summer reading lists, and the very specific social world of tween reading, where friends race through the same book so they can all watch the adaptation together. Then there are the littles. Esti (3) is deep in Madeline and The Very Impatient Caterpillar, which Teigen reads aloud in full character voices while the caterpillar keeps asking "am I a **** erfly yet?" and everyone shouts back, no. Wren (3), whom she affectionately calls "a much simpler man," wants Little Blue Truck and a "beep beep" on every page.
#reading #teigen #little #caterpillar
2 months ago
