The Amazing Captain Underpants!

As everyone probably knows, Captain Underpants premiered last Friday in theaters. When I saw that they were making a movie out of it, I knew that I had to take advantage of it as an opportunity to get my son interested in the books! Once I showed him the trailer, he instantly wanted to go see the movie, so I asked him if he knew that Captain Underpants was a comic book. His eyes lit up like a light bulb! He loves comic books, but the problem with most of them is that they are geared towards older readers - so this was perfect. We started borrowing copies of the series from the library and he was immediately hooked! After a short while, he was dressing up like Captain Underpants and running around screaming TRA-LA-LAAAAA - it was nothing short of awesome!

My superhero

Naturally, we went to go see the movie the day that it premiered. My son loved it! He was sitting on the edge of his seat for most of the movie, he was laughing and dancing - it was great. Afterwards, we took a trip to the bookstore and picked up some Captain Underpants books (one thing that I hate when a book inspired movie comes out, is that they are no longer to be found in the library - but it was a good opportunity for us to start this collection in his own personal library).

Movie time!

We started reading the first book in the series earlier this week before bed. We would read 4 chapters a night - which is a huge step in his reading journey. Prior to Captain Underpants, he has not read any chapter books. Without a doubt, kids like to emulate what they see, so when he sees me reading chapter books, he wants to do the same. As each night passed, I would show him the progress that he was making and it was exciting for him. It was rewarding for him to see that he was making progress on a "big boy" book. In turn, it was rewarding for me to see that he was excited to read each night and looked forward to finding out what happened next in his book.


Captain Underpants is the perfect book to get young readers involved and interested. My son could recognize many words in the book - he could even read several strings of words together. In terms of the illustrations in the book - I loved them because they weren't overwhelming. Sometimes when we are reading other books, I notice that the illustrations are so colorful and take up the entire page that it almost distracts my son from the story. He ends up making a story up from the pictures because he is not paying attention to the words. In Captain Underpants, there weren't pictures on every page and if there were pictures, they were in black and white and they were kept to a small size relative to the words on the page. One other thing that I loved about this book was the flip-o-rama - for this to be like an introduction to "big boy" reading, the author kept it fun. There was a small section in the book where you flip one page quickly back and forth to see some sort of animation. It was fun for both my son and I.

I'm really happy that they came out with the Captain Underpants movie because my son and I have turned a new leaf in this reading journey of ours due to it. Now that we have finished reading the first book in the series, it's time to go back to the bookstore and grab a few more. He's already looking forward to it.

Until we read again...