Summer vacation hasn’t even started yet for thousands of students in the U.S., but already the excitement for summer reading is hitting a fever pitch.

More than 39,000 kids have signed up to read in the Scholastic Summer Challenge since the Web site launched a month ago. To date, kids have read and logged more than 22 million minutes for their respective teams, and more than 3,700 schools have signed up for Scholastic Book Fairs’ Read for The World Record Challenge. Created to help stem the "summer slide" (the learning loss that can occur during the summer months), the Scholastic Summer Challenge lets students join teams, log minutes, play games to earn more points and enter sweepstakes – all to help motivate them to read “four or more” books this summer.