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Have different "experts" in the community come into the library after school to teach a group of students a new skill: origami, computer coding, scrapbooking, crochet/knit, etc.

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PJs & Pancakes event for dinner, complete with guest readers in different classrooms.

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Hold a "no screens" day or week at your school, complete with fun events or dress-up days. Encourage students to not use their devices outside of the school day.

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Reach out to local businesses to see if any of them are interested in donating to your event, or even sponsoring your entire cost for the event.

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Inspired by a Roots & Shoots project (https://rootsandshoots.org/projects/family-board-game-day/)

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The Problem

We hope to bring together families in the community for "unplugged" time to play board games. The board games will teach them basic literacy skills such as letter and number identification, following directions, graceful losing, counting, others. It will also teach social skills such as teamwork and taking turns. We hope to increase the literacy rate in our community since over 60% of our community's third graders are not proficient at reading. By encouraging working together as a family, we can begin at earlier ages and use the home as an extension of school teaching. In addition, we will be collecting and donating the board games to community battered family shelters which house over 1200 people so they can reconnect and begin positive memories to aid in their healing.

Our Plan

While delivering books to charities from a book drive, we discovered children in shelters were desperately in need of board games and books that would assist them in achieving reading level. As we delivered the books and saw children staring blankly at televisions, we were compelled to help these children learn some basic literacy skills through playing board games. Our area has less than 50 percent of third graders proficient in reading. This statistic is an accurate predictor of their future failure in school. Our group has sought to increase the reading proficiency in the area through various literacy events to make a difference, including encouraging board game play instead of non-interactive activities. Board game provides social interaction, a chance to learn how to win and lose gracefully, practice in strategy development and teamwork, and number and letter identification. Encouraging family board game play helps develop ongoing needed social and literacy skills for future academic success. In addition, board game donations we collect prior to and during the board game day will provide many hours of safe, fun, educational fun to families experiencing a traumatic time in their lives at battered family shelters. Not only will this one day of board game play effect the participants (Carnegie Mellon University Study (2007) - a group of low-income preschoolers playing a board game helped them improve their performance on 4 kinds of numerical tasks. Those gains were still evident 9 weeks later) but the positive experience will encourage them to integrate this play into their weekly family activities. The participants at the library will find the library a safe, comfortable place to conduct family activities encouraging future visits. The families in the shelters will experience the benefits of game play for many years to come (Hernnstein et al (1986) - middle school students can make substantial improvements in problem-solving ability - even general IQ - when they are taught general principles of critical thinking offered while playing board games).

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We hope to bring together families in the community for "unplugged" time to play board games. The board games will teach them basic literacy skills such as letter and number identification, following directions, graceful losing, counting, others. It will also teach social skills such as teamwork and taking turns.

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Much like a public library program has weekly storytelling throughout the summer, I would love to try the like on our school library lawn or in the library itself.

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Open for summer hours. If you don't have close access to the public library, host summer hours. Run incentives.

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Families can sign up for a yearly family book club where we all read the same book (at home) and then watch the movie together. We've used the local movie theater and the high school auditorium for the movie. In the summer during summer school students can stop in the library to check out books. We've also done a weekly story time after summer school classes.

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Family Fun during Read Across America Week. 

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Family Fun during Read Across America Week. 

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I work with the PBIS team to create an event that is in the library and to get parents in to read and craft with students. Here are some items I use.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yjCOaRFOA5UpVxwBm2XLu2ws2Sbz_OWX3rbVYGavvuk/edit?usp=sharing