Now that I’m an adult, I realize that one of the best things my parents ever did for me and my brothers and sisters was to read to us when we were young and have lots of books around the house when we were old enough to read them on our own. That gave us a true “head start” that stayed with us throughout our academic and professional careers.
Unfortunately, not everyone is so lucky. For whatever reason, literacy is not a priority in many homes. The mission of the Children’s Literacy Network (CLN) is to to fill that gap. The agency is working to ensure that all children in our community have an equal opportunity to develop a love of reading and books. It is a volunteer-based, nonprofit agency dedicated to closing the reading achievement gap that keeps low-income students from falling further behind their more affluent peers. CLN accomplishes this through innovative programming at the early childhood and school-age levels.
Recently, the Rotary Club of Ann Arbor awarded CLN a $5,000 grant to help fund the CLNReads program. CLNReads is an expansion of the agency’s highly effective Summer Book Program, which supports low-income students by providing each child with 6 new books of their choice for summer reading.
To increase the impact of the Summer Book Program, CLN is now pairing the distribution of books with a new interactive website. CLNReads.com was piloted with tremendous success at Holmes Elementary in Spring/Summer 2018. Our grant, plus money from the Ann Arbor Thrift Shop, Buhr Foundation, Galens Medical Society, and James and Faith Knight Foundation allowed CLN to expand CLNReads this spring to a total of four elementary school communities—including Holmes, Erickson, and Estabrook in Ypsilanti and Mitchell in Ann Arbor—and reach 1400 students and their families.
The website, CLNReads.com, is a very cool part of this program. Via this website, students set their reading goals, record reading minutes, and add and review books in their own virtual libraries. They can even chat about books with other students and teachers. When students reach certain levels, they earn “badges” for their efforts and accumulate points that they can redeem for prizes such as fidget spinners and free books. Parents and teachers use the website to create goals and incentives for the students, extending learning throughout the summer.
According to Cindi Saper, CLN’s Program Development Coordinator, the program has been very successful so far. Even though the summer is not yet over, readers have read more than 112,000 pages and logged more than 128,000 minutes of reading. As a result, CLN has given away 145 books and other prizes. What a great way to spread the love of reading.
The summer program will come to a close when school starts. At that time, CLN will give out the final round of prizes as an encouragement for kids to keep reading during the school year—and to encourage more kids to sign up the program next summer.
