On Friday, we celebrated “summer reading” and what a fabulous event it was. We held our Scholastic Summer Reading Celebration in the gym; the place was filled with children, staff members, and lots of excitement. With music playing and balloons afoft, children and classes were applauded for the incredible amount of reading they had done. The cheers were loud and long and with good reason.
Our school ranked 15th out of the thousands of schools that participated in the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge! We also met our school reading goal of 1,500,000 minutes. In this event, children kept track of the number of minutes they spent reading this past summer by entering the numbers into an online database run by
Scholastic, a well known children’s publisher. Because we met our goal, to the delight of everyone present, some of our staff members were “dunked” in an outside dunk tank. No doubt, it was the highlight of the day for everyone, except perhaps for the gallant and very wet “dunkees.”
The top readers in each grade were recognized and awarded a hard bound collector’s series of books courtesy of the PTA. The top classes in each grade will have a pizza party and the teacher of the class that read the most minutes received an award that will allow her to purchase materials for her classroom.
Not only did the children do all this reading but they also performed a community service by donating a penny for every minute read to the Allentown Public Library. In all they raised close to 750 dollars. At the celebration, Nancy Stein from
the library was there to accept the donation (picture on left.)
Truly, this was a school community event. In addition to the involvement of the public library, we are grateful to Fulton Bank for donating piggy banks to each child for collecting their pennies and to Colonial Bowling for providing gift bags for each child.
Special thanks and genuine applause go to two staff members, Ms. Sue Downs and Ms. Kimee Moore, for the magnificent job they did in spearheading this program. We can’t thank them enough.