The Have You READ It? Game Show, hosted by Bob Bookmark and Rita Digest, is our very playful spoof of a TV Quiz Show about books that is part of every Bodacious Book Show assembly program.

For more than fifteen years, our Bodacious Book Shows have been a featured part of PARP and reading programs at hundreds of Elementary schools. Educators, administrators and parents have seen that the fun approach we bring to books is an effective tool for motivating reluctant readers. Our Bodacious Book Shows work because they help students recall the fun they’ve had with the books they’ve read; help them feel good sharing their reading experiences with their fellow students; and entice them to read more by making everything about books fun and exciting — and an integral element of the success of these programs is “The Have You READ It? Game Show” which gets the entire audience thinking and talking about great books.

Great books make great readers. Discovering that you love a book and want to read it again can begin a lifelong habit of reading. It’s important to expand and reinforce a young reader’s relationship with the books they’ve read through experiential activities that actualize the joy inherent in reading good books. We first created the Bodacious Book Show with a New York State grant to support library reading programs and included this game show component to get kids to share their excitement about books they’ve read and hear about other great books they might love.

Bob Bookmark

Hosts Bob Bookmark and Rita Digest play The Have You READ It? Game with the entire audience all at once — rather than just getting a few students on stage as contestants. We get the whole audience raising their hands to answer questions and even shouting them out when it’s a classic book that everyone knows. The questions range from ones we know that all the students will know (like “What kind of eggs does Sam like with his ham?”) to some tough ones that only the better readers will know (“Who lives in London at 221B Baker Street?”) — because we want to make everyone feel good about the books they’ve read AND give kudos to the best readers, like the 5th grader we saw in one audience getting high fives from her classmates because she knew the answer was “Sherlock Holmes.”

Rita Digest

The competition of a game show is an effective tool for maximizing audience participation, though at the same time we don’t ever want to make a student feel like a loser when we’re talking about reading and books, so the questions are crafted to suit the grade and reading level of each audience and we always make sure all the students are winners by how we set up the teams: for school day assembly programs we divide the audience into two teams, the students vs. the teachers (or kids vs. their parents for family audiences). Yes, the students always win, but we do keep the teachers engaged with some playful questions just for them — while never putting them on the spot. The whole show is played strictly for laughs, with bells and whistles, special bonus questions and comic game show touches like our “Wheel of Reading” and “Name that Animal.”

What a kid reads is as important as how much, so in our assembly programs we focus on tried and true children’s classics and exciting multicultural and adventure stories, with Have You READ It? Game Show questions that draw on special reading lists we’ve devised  in consultation with teachers and librarians for each of the 3 different versions of our Bodacious Book Shows.

Learn more about all of our school programs