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More event and activity ideas
Read Across your home
- Book-nic
If it's cold outside, kids will love to see the picnic blanket spread on the livingroom floor, covered with books and delicious treats. Choose a theme around family food and reading preferences, e.g., enjoy honey grahams with Pooh in The Hundred Acre Wood (A.A. Milne).
- Make a joyful noise for reading
Music is a great way to express feelings and emotions. Can you and your children find appropriate background music that expresses feelings found in your favorite read-aloud? Explore your library for classical and folk selections. You might also try matching film soundtracks to appropriate parts of the books they were made from, like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (J. K. Rowling) or Tuck Everlasting (Natalie Babbitt).
Read Across your community
Dressing up is oh so fun, especially when the whole town turns out to see you! Parades for reading can be simple -- children and adults dressed as favorite storybook characters, or elaborate -- "Riders for Reading" with kids on bikes or unicycles or Shriners in their cars; book floats; a "Readers Court," complete with a Reading King and Queen; and the mayor and other dignitaries turned out to salute readers and reading.
- Proud to be an American reader
The same ideas and ideals that make you proud to be an American also make you proud to be an American reader. But as an American reader, you can identify books and characters, real and fictional, that evoke feelings of pride in America. Create a community booklist of titles recommended by local citizens -- titles for the American reader by American readers.
Just like eating green vegetables and getting plenty of exercise, reading is good for you. Help the doctors, nurses, nutritionists and pharmacists in your community spread the word. Host "reading clinics" at hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies to model good reading behaviors and provide resources for putting books into a balanced diet of healthy living.
Read Across your school
Who are the ultimate readers in your school? And what are they willing to do to prove it? Will they eat fried worms (gummi candy) ala How to Eat Fried Worms (Thomas Rockwell)? Can they climb a beanstalk (rope ladder) like Jack? Will they drink Freckle Juice (Judy Blume)? Search titles to create a challenge to tax even your boldest readers. Or create a booklist of "survivor" titles such as Hatchet (Gary Paulsen), A Girl Named Disaster (Nancy Farmer), My Side of the Mountain (Jean Craighead George) along with a competition to see who survives reading all the survivor books.
There's nothing like the promise of an adult making a fool of himself/herself to inspire readers to read to great lengths. Principals are popular targets for this activity, but librarians, custodians, bus drivers, coaches and other authority figures at school can join in. To make the reading challenge work, the challenge must be challenging, but doable, and the incentive, hilarious. It's helpful to recognize kids' incremental gains to meet the challenge and to be sure to celebrate their accomplishment in some fashion even if they don't make the mark. Some themes to consider:
- Reading food-themed titles for the challenge with the reward being the authority figure eating lunch on top of the school roof, or having himself/herself turned into dessert -- the human sundae covered with chocolate and whipped cream!
- A number of humorous books read in exchange for the authority figure dressing as a clown for the day.
- Making a remarkable change in appearance: shave heads or beards, dye hair outlandish colors, wear costumes or unusual clothes, etc.
- Fill your challenge list with books about animals and have your authority figure kiss one (pig, snake, goat, cow, llama, yak) to reward readers for meeting the challenge.
- Read Across America all year long
Use "Read Across America" as the theme to develop an extended reading challenge. The March 2 date can kick off or celebrate the completion of this activity that encourages reading books about our 50 states or earning mileage to move across a map of the U.S. for each book read. You can develop your own mechanism for tracking readers and take advantage of this booklist featuring titles about America, or have kids start reading across the country with Book Adventure.
Book Adventure (www.bookadventure.org), a free web-based reading motivation program for children in grades K-8, has teamed up with NEA's Read Across America to bring young readers a Read Across America reading adventure. Kids take multiple choice quizzes on the books they've read offline from the special list of titles related to our 50 states and the District of Columbia, and earn points good toward prizes for their literary successes. Among the prizes -- the coveted red and white stovepipe hat!
Send comments to readacross@nea.org
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NEA: NEA's Read Across America
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