Way to go! Liam Levesque and Carsen Wengrovsky

Kindergartner Liam Levesque and first-grader Carsen Wengrovsky have proved their love of books a thousand times over. The pupils at Riley Avenue Elementary School in Calverton were the first at Riverhead Free Library to go through 1,000 children's books in a reading initiative of the Mid-East Suffolk Teacher Center and the library.

The boys and their families checked out from the library a book bag filled with 10 books each of 100 times starting in the spring of 2009.

"A lot of times you go to the library and don't know what to get," said Liam's mother, Gwendolyn. "This forces you to expose kids to many genres."

She said she typically read with Liam an hour a day from books ranging from Dr. Seuss classics to the Berenstain Bears series. Carsen's family said the book he most enjoyed was "Click Clack Moo: Cows That Type" by Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin.

The boys were issued certificates of recognition from the Riverhead school district's Board of Education.

"The goal of the program is to improve vocabularies of children with the hope of closing the gap that exists before students start schooling," said center director Martha Kennelly.