With support from WSAZ Children’s Charities and the Cynthia Lorentz-Cook Award, Read Aloud West Virginia of Cabell County and the Cabell County Reading Council are teaming up to host a Flashlight Reading Night to encourage parents and children to read together this summer! The event will be on Tuesday, April 30 from 4:30-6:30 p.m. at Guyandotte Elementary, and is a great example of the way our Read Aloud chapters across the state are innovating and creating programs that work for the people they’re serving.
If you follow our events, you’ll notice that every county has a different way of engaging students and parents outside of the classroom. Some counties do Snuggle & Reads, where children receive a blanket and book and are encouraged to snuggle and read with their parents. In other areas, Mother Goose presentations are popular. This event involves a volunteer dressing up as Mother Goose to emphasize the importance of nursery rhymes on phonemic development. At the end, children receive a book of nursery rhymes to take home. All of our events have a core element of sending high interest, high quality literature home with children.
This flashlight event in Cabell County is a fun new take on an old classic. Like most of our events, it will feature a presentation, with tips and tricks for parents on how to keep their child engaged. Then students will receive a flashlight and a book of their choice that they can read with their parents. They get to take both home at the end of the event! Snacks will also be served.
The genius of giving children flashlights in conjunction with books is that it opens new opportunities for reading – how many late night car rides would be improved by a flashlight and a book? It also makes reading just a little, tiny bit rebellious, when you think about a kid staying up past bedtime, reading under the sheets. How many kids do you know who want to do something simply because they’ve been told not to? We know many. And while we’d never actively encourage children to break their parents’ rules, when the alternative to a book under those blankets is a phone or a tablet, we (and their developing brains and vocabularies) would much prefer they have a book.