While many Americans, especially kids, are happy to see the end of the school year, we want to watch out for the big case of summertime blahs that can infect children. Studies have consistently shown that three things have been happening to children over the last few decades: obesity is up and literacy is down, and things get worse over the summer.
United We Serve: Let’s Read. Let’s Move is a national initiative that calls on all Americans to participate in combating summer reading loss and childhood obesity through volunteering and community service during the summer months. From the organization’s web site, “Working together, Americans can foster a generation that is less prone to disease, has higher academic achievers, and is more educated about food and its effects on health. These factors can have lasting effects on a child’s overall development and future.”
There have always been summer reading lists compiled by regional libraries, but with this initiative, which started in 2012, there’s a larger umbrella to unify the various state and city agencies that have been working to keep kids active. In Atlanta, the initiative has set the groundwork for Mayor’s Summer Reading Club as well as GEEARS – the Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students, both of which work to get kids excited about reading and exercise.
For the third year, the Museum is proud to be partnering with these agencies and presenting a Let’s Read Let’s Move day this coming Saturday, June 7th. We have a full day of events planned, which you can read about at our website. These include a lantern-making craft, a scavenger hunt, a cooking demo, a bicycle helmet safety demo, and story time with Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed.
Saturday’s festivities mark the kickoff for two months of events around Atlanta celebrating reading, wrapping up with “A Summer of New Adventures” at the Woodruff Arts Center on August 2. You can find more events by visiting the Mayor’s Summer Reading Club’s events calendar.
On Saturday, all of the children who attend will leave with a free book. The books that are being read and given away are Stripes of All Types by Susan Stockdale, Nothing Ever Happens on 90th Street by Roni Schotter, and Amari’s Bike Adventure, by the Rollins Center for Language and Literacy at the Atlanta Speech School. All the books are wonderful, but we are especially taken with what the Atlanta Speech School has produced. This is the second book starring Amari, and we love having a young heroine learning about life in our city. In this book. she works hard to learn how to master a bicycle so that she can ride with her family in the Atlanta Beltline’s Lantern Parade.
According to Karen Kelly, Director of Exhibits and Education, “We have seen the research that shows that active kids do better in school, and we want to always encourage that as well as encourage literacy. We’d like to engage parents in their children’s learning, and a great, simple way to do that is to work on making reading itself a more cooperative and exciting time. We’ve learned that pausing throughout the stories that you read with your children to ask questions and wonder aloud what might happen next really does enhance learning, and keeps children motivated and excited by the stories that they’re reading.”
We’re thrilled to be working with the Mayor’s Summer Reading Club! We hope that you’ll join us for this kickoff event, because we have so much planned and so many neat activities going on throughout the day, and all of it will be so exciting. Karen said it best when she told us, “This is fun, y’all!”
Growing Into the World 