Super Family Literacy Night: Superhero Themed Reading Events! *Freebie!
If there’s one thing I love, it’s a good theme. In my own classroom, the theme was “bees”. Obviously. But every year, my librarian buddy and I try to plan a new and fun theme for the kids to center our reading events around.
We make bulletin boards, celebrate the 25 Book Campaign with the theme, and even plan our Family Literacy Night around it, too.
Last year, (yes, it’s been a whole year and I haven’t blogged about this yet – give me a break, I got married 🙂 our reading theme was Superheroes!
Superheroes are a great theme, because what kid doesn’t want to be a superhero? It also lends itself to lots of fun, creative activities and events.
In this post, I’ll share a little bit about how we used this superhero theme to build excitement about reading!
We also used it for our Family Literacy Night, which is our BIG literacy event each year!
We used superhero bulletin boards for everything – our GIANT 25 Book Campaign recognition board:
We divided up the space into months and posted each teacher’s name under the month. After the 25 Book Campaign for that month had been turned in, we took pictures of each class’ students who participated! They were proud to be featured on our board!
Our welcome back to reading board at the front of the school:
You can read about that here!
And of course, our Family Literacy Night. The year before, we had a Camping Themed Literacy Night, but this year, our theme was Super Family Literacy!
The week before the evening we were celebrating literacy, I created student bookmarks, tickets, pledges and stuffed brightly colored (donated) plastic bags with the materials they would need for the evening.
I put the reading pledge sheet and the bookmark inside the bag. Some (about 15) of the Reading Pledges had a pumpkin sticker in the corner.
If a child received a pledge with a pumpkin sticker, he/she could choose a free book to take home when they turned it in!To the outside, I stapled their “Super Snack” ticket. This ensures that each student actually gets one snack – if they get more than one, we’ll run out and some won’t get any.
We notified kids that they could wear their costumes because it was a couple days before Halloween. It was absolutely adorable.
As kids arrived, we handed out the bags and directed them gym floor to listen to the book, Dex: Heart of a Hero being read aloud. It was absolutely adorable – such a precious story about a wiener dog who decided enough is enough! He takes action to get stronger and quicker, and of course ends up saving the day.
After that, we directed them to complete several of the seven stations we had available to develop literacy and family fun! After completing each station, each child received several pieces of candy in their bags (we had plastic pumpkins full of candy and spider rings at each station). They carried their bags from place to place, completing stations, collecting candy, and having fun!
This was our Smack Attack Station: here, students listened to words being read from cards by the teacher, and then used the superhero-decorated flyswatter to smack the rhyming word!
At our Secret Identities Station, students decorated a cardstock cutout of a mask and used yarn to wear it!
We Need a Hero! required students to create a superhero using alliteration and then illustrate a cover for a comic book!
Everything we do, we do in English and Spanish to grow bilingualism in our students and help our Spanish-speaking parents communicate with their children about these activities.
At this station, This Looks Like a Job For…, students used a sentence strip to create a comic book about a superhero!
At the Super Snack Station, kids decorated cookies to look like superhero symbols! Each student received one snack ticket as they arrived, stapled to their bag. When they arrived, we collected the ticket to help make sure we didn’t have repeat customers at the snack station!
Of course, we had a building words station! Kids wrote “Superheroes read” on a sentence strip and cut between the letters to make cards. Then they built as many words as they could using those letters – parents actually got pretty competitive here!
Our most simple station was the Reading Headquarters. We used the gym stage and added some cozy furniture and a rug to make it an inviting area to read in!We added some baskets of high-interest books and (here’s the best part) made capes out of plastic tablecloths and yarn!
Students donned a cape and read a book with their buddies in Reading Headquarters! Even some of our older students enjoyed doing this!
A week or so later, I finally took all the pictures, pledges, and student products we had been given, and created our Super Family Literacy Night display in one of our glass display cases!
Want to learn more? Check out my How to Plan an Awesome Family Night video!
This is an awesome literacy night!! I'm so excited to share this with my school! We always do a multicultural theme but I think we need to spice it up and make it more interesting for the kids! This is perfect! I just added it to my wish list on TPT. Thanks for sharing!
Rambling About Reading
Are the tpt materials bilingual like the ones used at your literacy night? I love your ideas and would love to use at a literacy night at my school!
I too am desiring the bilingual version if possible. I purchased your TPT version in English. Please let me know if you have it available in Spanish 🙂
That is so nice to do