Read Across America Week: Celebrating Some Dr. Seusiness with...duh... Reading!

My librarian and I have had a blast planning our Read Across America schoolwide celebration! It seems like every time we talked about it, we added another fun element for the kids and for the teachers! We celebrated our week o’ reading early for reasons I do not know. But it gave me a jump on blogging and sharing these ideas with you, so you can use them this week! Monday During PE on Monday, each student was brought to the library. We had been collecting books all year, in English and Spanish for all grade levels. The kids each got to choose one free book, a pencil, and a bookmark! What better way to create excitement about reading than by giving them books they can read?!

One great way to collect cheap-ish books to give away to students is FirstBook.org. First Book is a great program designed to give kids a chance by providing books at the cost of shipping only to schools who qualify by having Title I, etc. We’ve placed several orders with First Book this year with great results.

Later that day, thirty minutes before the end of the school day, we asked teachers to stop their instruction, get their most favorite picture book in the world, and go to another classroom to read to the class! Some teachers decided to dress up, and some brought props!

One of our second grade teachers, Diciembre, dressed up as Fancy Nancy! She remained in character with a Fancy Nancy attitude as she went to the other second grade classrooms. What a great way to celebrate books with kids!

Many teachers even used their Special Delivery Book Bags to create excitement about reading!The teachers and kids loved it – they were so excited to share their favorite books, and the kids looooved having a different reader for a while!

Tuesday – ThursdayTuesday through Thursday, everybody in the school Dropped Everything And Read (Drop Everything And Read) for fifteen minutes each day. It’s an easy way to excited kids about reading! Kids could read anything they wanted, and so could the teachers – although we did ask that they avoid Fifty Shades of Gray. We didn’t want to create THAT kind of reading excitement.
FridayOn Friday, we had our guest readers – members of the community – come visit our school and read books aloud to the kids. This is always a special day full of interesting visitors and books. It’s a challenge for our librarian to collect enough readers who can confirm that they’ll be present, and the schedule is a bear, but it’s worth it to see how much the kids enjoy their guest readers!

A great guest reader from Border Patrol!

A therapist who came to read to our kids!

Our librarian decorated a room for the readers to lounge in and practice reading their books before they went to read in the classrooms. We created these cute centerpieces for the tables using the pots we made for our marshmallow pop treats for the teachers earlier in the week. Read about that here!

My librarian buddy set up a cute table full of books where the readers could choose a book to read to the classes they visited. There was a basket of great books in English, another basket in Spanish, and another full of Dr. Seuss books.