Photo by Ben White on Unsplash
During lunch today, I was skimming Facebook and came across a post from an awesome teacher friend Autumn with the following intro:
ISO: 21 Generous friends who are looking to bless one of my students for the year!
I was intrigued. I kept on reading…
Each month I receive the Scholastic Book Club fliers to send home for students to share with their families and purchase books if they would like. Many families cannot afford to purchase books to have at home, especially at various times of the year where holidays and new school supplies spread us all thin.
Here’s the idea I’d like to try out this year:
How amazing would it be for each student to receive one free book every month at no cost to his/her family?
Scholastic has books every month that are $1. I would LOVE for each of my students to be able to bring home one new book every month during the school year from September to May. It may seem crazy and unrealistic, but please keep reading! If I select the $1 book, that’s only $9 per child (for a FULL school year)! Every month I would be able to bless every one of my students with a new free book that they will get to keep, all because of you!
Before I could even finish reading the post, which provided all the logistics for getting involved, it was updated…
**** UPDATE: YOU GUYS ARE AMAZING!!! I HIT MY GOAL within 30 MINUTES!!! Thank you so much for your support! I LOVE YOU ALL!! My teacher heart is bursting with love for you all. I cannot wait to bless my littles this entire year! Thank you from the bottom of my heart! 
By the time I had finished my lunch, I noticed at least five other teachers had copied the post and were fully funded within minutes. It was like an auction house selling a stack of Picasso originals for $9/each. People were greedily grabbing them all up. I felt lucky to finally catch an opening for a kinder class and signed up to be a book friend!
What an awesome, simple way to work on closing the rich/poor reading achievement gap while promoting the value of reading.
I wonder how else we can play with this generous idea..
- What if it was set up like Secret Pals and the adults got a list of what the child was interested in, and the adult could pick out/order the book every month?
- What if a FlipGrid was set up so adults could share their favorite books with the student so as to build a connection with a trusted adult?
- What if we had volunteers to record themselves reading the books for children who don’t have a literate or English speaking parent at home?
What other “what ifs” could we add?
Have you implemented a program like this in your classroom? How’d it go? I’d love to hear from you.
Blog post title is attributed to Thomas Aquinas.
* Sharing is caring, so share some love with a ‘like’ and then share this blog post with a colleague.*
Laura K Spencer, Ed.D. 
Wonderful post 🙂
LikeLike
Thanks so much!
LikeLike