TEMECULA -- With one month remaining before school resumes, local librarians said this week that now is the perfect time for young people to pencil in some time for reading.

Summer reading is not only essential for helping them perform better on upcoming classroom assignments, it also gets them back into the scholastic swing of things, they said.

The librarians not only had a long list of tips on how to get kids excited about the idea of cracking open a book, but also plenty of suggestions on what titles might interest them.

But one piece of advice was echoed above all else -- reading for pleasure.

"I recommend it being recreational as opposed to purely academic," Jo Tittleton, a children's technician at the Temecula Public Library, said of summer reading.

That type of attitude fosters a love of reading and doesn't make it seem punitive, she said.

Sometimes, however, there is a certain age with children when parents have a hard time finding the right book, said Lynn Cohen, an assistant at the Temecula Public Library.

That age is roughly between late first grade, throughout second grade, and early third grade, when children have a wide range of reading abilities, she said.

During the summer months, many parents with children in those early grades have said they don't know what to check out for their children, Cohen said. In fact, there have been so many requests from parents for advice that Cohen said she created a list of book suggestions.

"The hardest ages are second and third grade," she said. "Some are reading really well," she added, which can be a problem if they're reading books geared for older children that may have more mature themes.

Getting children and teens to read for fun can take some ingenuity, but Diana Massey, a reference staff member with the Temecula Public Library, said there are plenty of ideas parents can employ.

She used to set aside 10 to 20 minutes to spend reading with her children each day. She and her two boys would grab their favorite books and read silently or out loud as a family activity, she said.

She also encourages parents to set up reading goals for their children or teens, such as at least one chapter a day, 10 pages, or 10 minutes per day. She said that in her experience setting goals is something kids, especially the younger ones, can get excited about.

Prizes are also a great motivator, she said. Most libraries in Southwest County have some sort of summer reading program that rewards children with trinkets for reading books.

Massey said she would also take her boys for ice cream after they finished a book.

Another great trick she used as her boys were growing up was to replace toys and DVDs in her car with books, magazines or comics. Additionally, she said she got them subscriptions to magazines that interested them to foster the idea of reading for pleasure.

Her boys are now 16 and 19 years old, and are both performing well in school, she said. Her youngest gets A's in his English classes, and her oldest is a science major in college.

As for summer reading, Massey said it's all well and good, but she added that reading should always be a year-round event for all families.

READING SUGGESTIONS

PRETEENS

For boys:

- "The White Fox Chronicles" by Gary Paulsen

- "The Lost Years of Merlin" by T.A. Barron

- "Where the Red Fern Grows" by Wilson Rawls

For girls:

- "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" by Ann Brashares

- "The Princess Diaries" by Meg Cabot

- "Ashes of Roses" by Mary Jane Auch

LATE FIRST GRADE, SECOND GRADE, AND EARLY THIRD GRADE:

- "A-Z Mysteries" series by Ron Roy

- "The Unicorn's Secret: The Journey Home" by Kathleen Duey

- "The Time Warp Trio" series by Jon Sczieska

- "My Weird School" series by Dan Gutman

- "Magic Tree House" series by Mary Pope Osborne

- "Bunnicula" stories by James Howe