Read the Most From Coast to Coast and Read Across America Week

You'd think after a week of snow days, I'd be more prepared, but nope, here I am at school again on a Sunday trying to get things done!  Well, some of that includes copying and getting things ready for this Friday and next week, so I guess I have some excuse!

Nevertheless, this Friday, we are participating in Renaissance Learning's "Read the Most from Coast to Coast."  You can find out more on their website {here}.  That will be our kickoff for Read Across America week.  We're extending it a week because frankly, I want it to go back to the way it was when we did it several years ago when it was BIG.  Being the library media specialist and part of the correlate that is putting on the whole show, I find myself mostly in charge! :)  One of our committee members brought up a good point that while Dr. Seuss is fun for the younger crowd, the fourth and fifth graders see the whole thing as babyish, so we're doing "Read Across America" week instead of "Dr. Seuss Week."  Still, we're dressing up as favorite characters and other things during the week, having quotes announced each morning from authors, and highlighting different genres.  One of our members also made a "choice board" so teachers could fit what they could into the curriculum.  After a week of missed school, it should be well appreciated!

While I'm still getting together my centers, lessons, etc for the library, I do have something I wanted to share with you!  With the "Read the Most" with "Across America," I thought it would be cute to do an interactive poster/board.  While not an original idea (I saw something on Pinterest), I thought it would go well with a reading challenge to our teachers based on the # of pages read during class.  We're throwing in math and graphing to the mix and providing teachers with different templates to use (younger grades can use the hundreds chart while older grades can create bar graphs or line graphs).  We're lucky enough to have a poster maker in our school, so I'll be taking "orders" this week to what type of graphs each teacher wants!

I'm also going to make a poster of the USA with cute cars that count for each 100 pages read.  I googled and found that from VA Beach, VA to San Jose, CA is almost 3,000 miles (2,990 to be exact), so hence the 3,000 goal.  I'm hoping we'll exceed that!  So, please click on the link {here} to access this file on Google Drive.  I won't be uploading it to my store at this point and wanted to offer it as a freebie to my readers!

So, between Virginia Readers Choice and other reading challenges, I hope to be posting and sharing more soon! (The Iditarod is coming up and I am so psyched to do something in the library about it!!!).