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Literacy at Lakeview

School hosts Family Literacy Night to remind everyone of the importance of reading. And they had some fun while doing it.

COTTONWOOD

Most parents and educators know that reading is instrumental to academic success. More often than not, it’s also been determined to be a key indicator to success in life as well.

To highlight and encourage the importance of reading, Lakeview School recently hosted a Family Literacy Night.

“The objective for the evening is to remind parents and children of the importance of reading and to build upon the partnership between families and school,” said Susanne Lee, literacy, intervention and Title I coordinator at Lakeview. “In the past, we’ve had a fall festival for the PTO, but they decided not to do that this year. I had scheduled the book fair during this time, so when they decided not to do that, I thought I would replace it with a Literacy Night instead.”

Since Lee opted to collaborate with this year’s book fair theme, “Ahoy, Bookkeepers,” there were plenty of pirates of all ages in attendance. Upon arrival at Lakeview School, every youngster was given a pirate name by high school student volunteers Laryn “Bucko Byrd” Butterfield and Kayla “Scallywag O’Malley” Kurowski.

“The high school kids you see helping are our National Honor Society and National Junior Honor Society students,” Lee said. “They need to do some community hours within their year – during their time in those organizations. I reached out to their adviser (Nicole Fischer) and all these great kids volunteered to come and help.”

The Literacy event featured more than 10 different fun and educational stations for the pre-K through sixth-grade students to take part in along with having access to resources for both children and parents. A large number of volunteers and organizations were part of the effort, making it a fun-filled, well-rounded occasion.

“I really like this,” parent Patty Ebnet said. “It’s really cool. I’m glad they switched it up.”

Ebnet’s daughter, Kassidy, was one of the students who used the opportunity to get a public library card.

“We have United Way here with some resources,” Lee said. “They have books and activities available. The public library is also here. Students can get library cards if they don’t have one. They’ll be able to help families with that. We have the Literacy Volunteers of Southwest Minnesota here, too. They are providing an activity. They do a lot of outreach to English (language) learners in the Marshall area.”

Along with Will Thomas, Literacy Volunteers executive director Candace Thomas came up with an appropriate hands-on activity for the event.

“We were told it was a pirate theme, so I said why don’t we try to come up with a science experiment,” she said. “Pirates need oceans or they can’t work, so we came up with ‘ocean in a bottle.'”

When asked what her favorite activity of the night was, Hannah Fry said: “Making the ocean thing, that little juice thing.”

Third-grader Kaylee Hartke said she enjoyed Literacy Night.

“I liked it,” she said. “My favorite was the ocean thing, too.”

Lakeview second-grader Jaden Padfield said his experience at the event was “good.”

“I had fun,” Padfield said. “I liked everything.”

Padfield also received two (free) books throughout the evening and noted he was glad he was able to attend.

“I got them over there,” he said. “I like reading.”

Numerous studies have shown that being read to – especially important before a child reaches preschool – also influences a child’s early educational success. To build on that, Lakeview Principal Scott Hanson and Dean of Students Melissa Wilber were clad in rain gear and read “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” to many of the students.

There was also storytelling of the “Story Me Letters” alphabet book, along with a book walk and many make-and-take activities spread across the commons area.

“All the stations turned out good,” Wilber said. “It was fun for the kids.”

Students had the opportunity to make “hook” hands and telescopes in addition to playing the Captain Hook toss and walk the plank game.

Lakeview teachers Peggy Peterson and Lindsey Sabin helped out with the “swashbuckling word dig.”

“We had a great group of teachers coming in to volunteer their time,” Lee said. “We have a variety of volunteers. We have some Minnesota Reading Corps tutors who are running some activities, along with fifth-grade teachers, preschool teachers, special education teachers and first-grade teachers. There’s a lot of people chipping in.”

In addition to pirate role playing opportunities, students could try out “pirate poetry” and also collect gold coins as they completed a treasure-hunt activity.

“Our schools has all kinds of events, like sporting events and other extracurricular events – all of which are important – but it’s just nice to have an event based on literacy,” Lee said. “Just to have families come in and focus on reading, I think is fantastic.”

During the evening, families could also purchase books at the book fair or buy supper at Louba’s Lunch Wagon on site. The food included: gold nuggets, treasure chest chicken salad sandwiches, shipwreck sloppies, captain’s cookies, treasure chips, jewel juice and sea water.

Later in the auditorium, educational entertainer Brian Richards got the crowd laughing and fired up about reading. The Lakeview PTO sponsored the speaker.

Richards started off by revealing three things about reading.

“Reading expands your imagination and helps you with testing,” he said. “The more you read, the more you know. Number three is the name of the show: kids who read are cool.”

Richards went on to juggle – often intentionally ungraceful – and do a number of magic tricks with audience members. Young Trinity used her imagination to “enlarge” a $1 bill into an oversized $20 bill, while 8-year-old Landon helped out by pretending to be a chicken during the disappearing egg trick.

“I’m going to show you one of the oldest tricks in the book,” Richards said to Landon. “But to do this, you have to be able to make the noise of a chicken. So I’ll say, ‘One, two, three’ and then you’re going to do the best chicken you can so everybody can hear you.”

Richards went on explaining the act, and all went well until he asked his young assistant to lay an egg.

“As soon as you lay an egg, I’ll drop it into the bag and it will disappear,” Richards said.

Landon replied that he couldn’t lay an egg, while the audience politely laughed. Judging by the smiles and laughter, it appeared as though everyone had an outstanding experience at Literacy Night.

“The educational entertainer’s focus was on the importance of reading at home, too,” Lee said. “So the event was connected all the way around.”

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