Teamwork puts books in homes of Tucker County students

by Book DistributionEventsNews

Kindergarten students at Tucker Valley Elementary/Middle School received book shelves and books for their homes at the school’s year-end picnic.

Read Aloud chapter coordinator Tracy Harlan partnered with Janice Brady of West Virginia Children’s Home to the benefit of both organizations.

“I donated 100 teen books to WVCH and in turn, Mr. Mike Mason, woodworking instructor, and a team of students worked on building the shelves,” said Harlan.

“It was an amazing result,” she continued. “We got the shelves we needed and [Brady] created a mobile lab for her students to use to check out books. It was a win-win for all!”

NGK supports Read Aloud, local communities

by DonorsNewsSupportersUncategorized

NGK Spark Plugs (U.S.A.), Inc. recently announced they will become a corporate sponsor of Read Aloud West Virginia. A $3,000 contribution in 2015 is the first in what is anticipated to be a multi-year partnership.

The company joins ECA and BrickStreet as ongoing sponsors.

“NGK is proud to partner with Read Aloud West Virginia in an effort to increase reading capability in our schools,” said NGK Senior Vice President of Manufacturing Bob Pepper.

“High education standards are critical to the success of our state,” Pepper continued, “and Read Aloud WV’s program is vital to that effort.”

Read Aloud Executive Director Mary Kay Bond noted the donation is both a show of support for Read Aloud and a clear indicator of the company’s dedication to the well-being of West Virginia’s communities.

“NGK’s corporate partnership enables us to continue our efforts to build program consistency around the state. It also underscores the company’s commitment to the citizens of West Virginia,” noted Bond.

Read Aloud WV is very grateful to NGK for their vote of confidence.

 

Family honors patriarch’s love of reading, golf

by DonorsNewsSupporters

The Paul Fox Memorial Foundation has given Read Aloud West Virginia $4,000, which the Fox family raised at its Memorial Golf Tournament in May. The family started the event in memory of Paul Fox, who was an avid golfer. He also was an avid reader, a trait that influenced future generations of the Fox family and ultimately resulted in their gift to Read Aloud.

The event attracted 112 players. BrickStreet was the lead sponsor.

Son-in-law David Walker explained, “Paul was an avid golfer. He got me into golf. He also was an avid reader. He was not a college person, but he was an unbelievable reader. It rubbed off on my girls. My oldest daughter Kinsey went into philosophy (an area of strong interest for Fox.)” She joined Teach for America and now is pursuing a degree in education policy at Vanderbilt University.

Walker, who has a degree in education, read aloud in his daughters’ classrooms for 10 or 12 years at Richmond Elementary in Charleston, and he is occasionally asked back to read even now. The teachers need men to serve as reading role models, he said.

Walker’s wife, Kathleen, and daughters Kinsey and Karley all have been volunteer readers and attended Seuss-A-Palooza events at BrickStreet, where Walker is employed as a safety and loss consultant, and then Read-A-Palooza at Paterno’s at the Park in Charleston.

That exposure led Kinsey to ask her father, “Why don’t we make a donation to Read Aloud West Virginia?” which they did.

The importance of a strong grandparent-parent-child connection exemplified by the Fox-Walker family is one that Read Aloud emphasizes through its parent education program, Director Mary Kay Bond said. Parents and grandparents remain the primary influence in creating lifelong readers.

“That is a crucial link,” she said. She plans to expand Read Aloud’s efforts in this area with physicians and the WIC (Women, Infants and Children) program.

“The Fox contribution is an incredible gift,” Bond said. “It gives us flexibility to more easily tailor programs to chapter needs.”

Hollowell helps Read Aloud partner with Greenbrier Campaign for Grade Level Reading

by NewsSupporters

By Lynn Lewis Kessler

The Hollowell Foundation, a Greenbrier County-based philanthropy, recently awarded a $3,000 grant to Read Aloud West Virginia. The grant provides partial funding to initiate a program designed to reduce summer reading loss.

Read Aloud, a partner in Greenbrier County Schools’ Campaign for Grade Level Reading, plans to offer a program that allows students at Crichton Elementary to self-select paperback books to read throughout the summer. The program is based on a study conducted by Richard Allington and Anne McGill-Franzen. The three-year study provided self-selected, high-interest material for students to read during the summer months and found those students engaged more often in voluntary summer reading and had significantly higher reading achievement than a control group.

The Campaign for Grade Level Reading is a collaborative effort by foundations, non-profit partners, states and communities across the nation to ensure that more children in low-income families succeed in school and graduate prepared for college, a career and active citizenship, according to Nancy Hanna, Director of Early Childhood Education for Greenbrier County Schools.

“Greenbrier County Schools is thrilled to have Read Aloud West Virginia as one of its partners,” said Hanna. “Engaged communities mobilized to remove barriers, expand opportunities, and assist parents in fulfilling their roles and responsibilities to serve as full partners in the success of their children are needed to assure student success.”

The Hollowell Foundation honors the philanthropic efforts of Otto and Margaret Ford Hollowell by supporting projects that sustain and advance educational, scientific, literary, recreational and cultural endeavors throughout the Greenbrier Valley.

“The Hollowell Foundation is very pleased to support Read Aloud West Virginia,” said the Foundation’s Executive Director Sherry Ferrell. “Their educational programming is very important to the students in our area and helps us achieve our mission of enhancing the quality of life in Greenbrier County.”

Read Aloud will work throughout the school year to secure additional local funding, which will enable the program to be offered to all grades at Crichton beginning in May 2016.

 

Illustrator to Visit Summers County July 11

by Uncategorized

‘John Henry’ illustrator to visit Summers County

TALCOTT, W.Va., June 15, 2015 — Illustrator Peter Thornton will visit West Virginia to bring the tale of John Henry to life once more at John Henry Days in Summers County.

A reading of “A Natural Man, the True Story of John Henry” is set to follow the grand parade on July 11 in Talcott.

Thornton worked with narrator Steve Sanfield to create this retelling of the story of West Virginia’s steel-driving man. Learn more and buy the book here

For more information about Thornton and his art and illustrations, visit him on Facebook.

John Henry Days celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The three day festival begins with live music on Friday, July 10 and runs through Sunday, July 12, 2015. See the full schedule here.

Help Read Aloud West Virginia bring $25K to the Mountain State

by NewsSocial Media

(CHARLESTON, WV) May 14, 2015 – Read Aloud West Virginia has been selected by the State Farm Youth Advisory Board (YAB) as a top 200 cause in the nation in the 2015 State Farm Neighborhood Assist Program. From May 14 to June 3, the Facebook community will vote for their favorite causes. The 40 causes with the most votes will each be awarded $25,000.

To support Read Aloud West Virginia and vote, visit the State Farm Neighborhood Assist app at https://www.state-assist.com/cause/1504325/read-aloud-west-virginia. Individuals can vote 10 times a day with one easy Facebook visit. You can also help bring these funds to West Virginia by spreading the word to family and friends.

Read Aloud’s mission is to change the literacy culture in West Virginia by keeping books in the hands and on the minds of our state’s children. In support of that mission, the organization offers programs in four primary areas: Volunteer Readers, Public Education, Book Distribution and Classroom Enrichment. Read Aloud currently serves chapters in 25 counties in West Virginia. Funds from the State Farm Neighborhood Assist program would allow the organization to continue to expand to serve more West Virginia students and families.

To learn more about Read Aloud West Virginia or get involved, visit www.readaloudwestvirginia.org, call (304)345-5212 or e-mail readaloud@frontier.com.

State Farm Neighborhood Assist is a crowd-sourced philanthropic initiative that lets communities determine where grant funding is awarded. The initiative used the State Farm Youth Advisory Board to vet submissions and allows Facebook users who download the State Farm Neighborhood Assist application to vote for the final 40 grant winners. The program has been inspired by the incredible number of neighborhoods that are coming together to solve a problem or improve their community.

What happens when you read to children?

by Resources

What happens when you read to children?

It hardly seems possible that something so low-tech, so enjoyable, could actually boost children’s grades, test scores and lifetime achievement. But it does. When you simply enjoy books with the children in your life, a lot of things happen:

1. Children learn new words and ideas.
Without even realizing it, children of any age absorb great new words and more understanding of the world around them. Then, when they read on their own, whether for school or for fun, children recognize words they encounter, and the text has meaning. That’s why it is important to start reading to children from birth.

TIP: Prolong conversations with children, even small ones. Engage them in describing what they see or what they have done in a day. Books are great for this.

LINK: Make yours a read aloud home — 10 things parents should know.

2. Children increase their own reading comprehension.
Reading is more than sounding out words and pronouncing them quickly, like items on a shopping list. The words in each sentence relate to all the others to produce meaning and sensation. Some children – even those who can look at tough new words and pronounce them correctly – do not readily draw meaning from the text. You see this when children know all the words in a story, and they’re paying attention, but they don’t get the joke, or they don’t sense when the end of a story is near. Children who regularly listen to stories they enjoy tend to develop good reading comprehension.

TIP: Pause to discuss when your child wants to talk about the action in a story. Encourage children to predict what will happen next, but don’t quiz. This reading time is just for fun.

LINK: More about reading comprehension from Reading Rockets.

3. You share your passion with children.
We talk about reading stories, and that often means fiction – novels, chapter books, many picture books. But any kind of reading that you can enjoy with a child will work. If you love basketball or history or travel, non-fiction (true) books may be your best friend. Magazine or newspasper articles and biographies that you enjoyed are all good choices to share. Read what interests you and the child. Children’s author Jon Scieszka (rhymes with fresca) has observed that boys in particular respond to funny books, disgusting imagery and stories about real people.

TIP: If you have trouble getting a child interested in books, go to the library and ask for books about anything that interests you both — bugs, Star Wars, horses, basketball, Egyptian mummies. Browsing the pictures and reading what interests you counts.

LINK: Jon Scieszka’s Guys Read website is full of recommendations for all ages.

4. Children become readers themselves.
Parents find that if they make time for just 20 minutes of read aloud most days of the week, children grow to like it so much they ask for more. Then they ask to read the book on their own, or they want to look for other books. Children who read for fun do better in school and have higher test scores than children who do not read for pleasure. They also write better, have better vocabularies, know grammar, spell better, read faster, know more about literature, know more about science and social studies, have more cultural literacy, have more practical knowledge, get better grades in writing classes and have less anxiety about writing. Students who read regularly also do better on the Test of English as a Foreign Language.

TIP: Make a regular trip to your public library to check out and return books. Whether once a week or once a month, the habit will pay off.

LINKS: The National Assessment for Educational Progress (this one is from 2011) surveyed students and found higher test scores were associated with children who reported reading for pleasure more frequently.

“The Power of Reading” by Stephen D. Krashen documents other benefits of reading aloud with children.

5. You share your values with children.
While sharing stories, even funny or silly stories, sometimes children raise questions. These questions can lead to discussions of right and wrong, sportsmanship, courtesy, friendship, discrimination or other weighty subjects. Children – even older children – naturally look to parents and then to other adults around them for their opinions and judgment. It may not be obvious in the moment, but reading aloud regularly creates opportunities for parents to stay informed and be influential in a child’s life.

6. You nurture children’s health and well-being into adulthood.
Children who read for fun generally read better on their own and do better in school and on tests than children who do not read for pleasure. Children who thrive in school tend to go further, not only to finish high school, but to college or other post-secondary education and beyond. More education is associated with better employment opportunities and higher earnings throughout life. People of higher income tend to enjoy healthier lives. People who read well are better able to look after their health needs.

7. You give yourself a welcome interlude in the day.
Reading has been shown to cause relaxation and may help you fall asleep. Older people who continue to read show less memory loss and suffer fewer effects of dementia. When adults make time to read to children for the children’s benefit, adults often discover that they themselves feel richer and stimulated by the experience, and they miss it when their reading time is interrupted.