March was Literacy Month at James Park Elementary
 

Sunshine Hanan is the PAC President at James Park Elementary and a former Stories Galore and More facilitator. Sunshine told me about James Park’s Literacy Month initiative and what it involved. They picked the month of March to encourage kids to continue reading over spring break. They had a number of events planned for the month and started with distributing Reading Records for the students to take home. The goal was to read for 20 minutes every day - this could be parents or siblings reading to children, children reading to parents or siblings, children reading on their own, and teachers reading to students. Additionally, they encouraged students to try different source materials, so books, newspapers, graphic novels, comics, etc. This was to make it as easy as possible for students to be successful. Terry Fox Library came in and did a PJ story which had about 35 families attend. The school hosted a book drive/book swap where they encouraged all of the students to bring in one book to donate, then had an opportunity for every student to take a book so they had something to read over Spring Break. About 2000 books were donated and each student was given either 2 picture books/early readers or 1 novel. It was then opened up for parents and students to purchase additional books, with everything priced at $1 or less. Sunshine believes at least 1000 books were distributed in that one day! They ran other events as well - a movie night where "Babe" was shown as a movie adapted from a book and a "dress up as your favourite literacy character" day.  

At the end of Spring Break, students returned their Reading Records, where 161 out of 345 students participated. Of those, 123 included 20 or more days of reading and most were the full 31 days. They gave all of the students who returned their records a special 'Freezie Day', those who read for 20 or more days received a voucher for a kid's meal at Boston Pizza, and the class with the highest percentage of reading from those records that were returned will be getting a pizza party. They also had some additional random prizes that were distributed as well. 

Overall, it was a very successful initiative. James Park staff and families all supported the event enthusiastically, and while only half of the students returned their reading records, they know that more students were reading than usual. Teachers shared stories of students coming in to share what they had been reading with the class each day, and encouraging each other to read books that they liked. Return rates were much higher with the younger grades, but Sunshine thinks if they were to continue the event over the next few years, they would slowly see a higher return rate among older students as well.

Way to go James Park!!  I hope you continue this program every year!