Segue Supports Family Literacy Book Take-Away

By: Jill Marie

This month I had the chance to serve the Segue/CF community in a unique way. With three days of family conferences occurring during the last week of January, I devised a way to help increase family literacy (an important component of increasing all students' achievement in reading and writing) by setting up a SEGUE SUPPORTS FAMILY LITERACY BOOK TAKE-AWAY display in the Media Arts Center. It included helpful tips and information for increasing family literacy. Families who passed through to participate in RIDE's Survey Works were invited to visit the table, choose books to take home with them, ask questions, as well as receive information about the local public libraries and get an application for a library card.

This project involved multiple stages of preparation. I first had to inventory the library, going through each section to identify and pull out books that were either age-inappropriate for our Segue Scholars, or titles of which we had many duplicate copies. I then wrote up the list of information to display on a poster accompanying the table, had it translated into spanish by our awesome Family Engagement Coordinator, Mrs. Morel, then had it printed it on handouts so that our families could reference the information at home. Ms. Hernandez, Ms. Neal and I managed to send almost every family who visited for conferences home with an average of seven or eight books to add to their home libraries and share with their family members. 

This project was both fulfilling and productive. It allowed for the clearing of some space in the library, thus furthering our goal of making sure our book collection is truly serving the needs of our scholars. It also gave us a chance to provide books in the homes of many families who might only have had a few, if any, to begin with. The more printed materials at home, the more reading will occur there. Kids who see their parents reading are more likely to want to read at home, which directly and positively impacts their levels of overall academic achievement. It also gives students a chance to both increase their skills, while at the same time helping their family members who struggle as readers themselves. One of our suggestions was to have the students read to those family members who may not be able to read well themselves. As a reading-specialist in training, this project gave me the perfect opportunity to put theory into practice; furthermore, it was personally fulfilling to be able to serve the Central Falls community as a whole. 

The Book Take-Away Table

By Kids, For Kids

By: Leah

This year one of our fall service projects was a books on tape undertaking, where we decided to record the voices of ICS students reading children’s poems. We wanted to make the project fun and memorable, so we selected some of the silliest poems we could find  - unsurprisingly, Shel Silverstein’s work made the cut. Poems like “Homework Machine”, Cookwitch Sandwich”, and “Zebra Question” were only a few of the enticing titles we chose.  Our project was titled A Collection of Voices: Poems Read by Students, for Students, and it turned out awesome.

Title page (Pay no attention to the glaring glare!).

Our project involved a lot of hard work from our students. They were first given the poems to practice, and were then recorded for the CD (strangely there were no tapes at the electronics store…). Each student had to make his or her reading as perfect as possible, as we couldn’t piece together parts of the poems to fill in mistakes. They did such a great job! I was so impressed with the quality of readers at ICS, especially the younger ones. They put effort and expression into the poems, and you can really hear the hard work through their voices.

A sample page from our book – I’d live in that castle.

In addition to recording the poems, students created drawings to go along with each page of the book. The best pictures were selected to go in the final product, and the pages were mounted and laminated to give it a finished look. The book includes a pocket in the back where the CD can be found, and the poems are consistent with the CD tracks. About 10 students read the 17 poems on the CD, and they did such an amazing job. We decided to donate the book to the Meeting Street School Library, where students there could get the benefit of both the visual and audio components.

Like celebrities, lamination is always better in person.

The ICS students who participated in this project should not only be proud of their verbal reading skills, but also what they contributed to our service project. It was very well received at Meeting Street School, and I know that a lot of students there will enjoy listening to the recordings and following alongside the words and pictures for years to come. Job well done!

Our back page with a batman-shaped glare.