Centennial Middle School students become well-traveled via grant-funded adventures in reading
In recent weeks, Centennial Middle School’s seventh grade students have become seasoned travelers, roving foreign lands, encountering new people and collecting new experiences – all without airplanes or passports. The portal? Books.
Thanks to a $2,000 youth literacy grant from the Dollar General Literacy Foundation, Centennial’s seventh grade English language arts (ELA) department is now stocked with over 100 books spanning an array of genres for students to check out and read on their own, as well as four new novel sets for in-class reading as part of their curriculum.
Acquiring the grant – and the books – came through the work of seventh grade ELA teacher Rachel Baker.
“For teachers that are teaching ELA, it is often difficult for us to buy all of our students a diverse collection of reading material,” Baker said. “Unfortunately, our students don’t fare too well on a lot of the state assessments just because we don’t have that ready access to a lot of reading material. Dollar General acknowledges that and is doing their part to make sure we have what we need, be it something so simple.”
Shortly after school closures commenced in March, Baker’s students expressed in a virtual classtime that they missed being able to hold a book in their hands and read for leisure.
“They look at digital technology as a gaming tool, not something they associate with reading; they actually need to have a book in their hands,” Baker said. “But not everybody has access to the public library or has a Kindle available to them. I knew when I came back in July that I needed to address the need my students told me they experienced last spring. They said to me,
‘Mrs. Baker, can you please, please, please make it so that if we get stuck at home, we have one or two books that we can take home with us?’”
Baker prompted her students to draft a list of the books they wished they could have been reading during that time and got to work.
“I thought, ‘Maybe I can afford to buy these books,’ and then I saw the cost,” Baker said. “I started doing internet searches, because we all had a lot of quarantine time on our hands, and I said, ‘ Who out there is willing to help me give my kids what they need?’ And Dollar General answered that call for me in a very big way.”
In early September, Baker received a congratulatory email from the foundation letting her know that the grant funds were on their way; by Oct. 15, the books were on the shelves and Baker’s “library system” was set up and ready for check-outs.
“I used books when I was younger to give myself a mental break,” Baker said. “And that’s what books are for kids – a mental break where they can take a trip that they don’t need a plane ticket for, don’t need a passport or a visa or to worry about borders. They can escape to another world, whether it’s realistic fiction, historical fiction, autobiographies, science fiction or fantasy or informational. And we find that if they have a choice in what they read, they’re more apt to read.”
According to Baker, she and her students are “COVID conscious” with every book that’s checked out; students are required to sanitize before and after handling a book, and Baker waves an ultraviolet wand over each one to further disinfect them before putting them back on the shelf.
Through in-class book tastings – similar to wine tastings, sans the alcohol – Baker whets appetites by reading snippets of different books, which students rate on a scale of one to five stars. Then, if the sample has them eager to experience the whole story, the students write a review to convince Baker why they should be first in line to read it.
“One of the things they have to be able to do is write persuasive essays, so they have to persuade me that they should be the one who gets the book,” she said. “I try to incorporate their writing skills, their reading comprehension, their persuasive techniques all into one thing that they chose to do.”
According to Baker, she’s simply grateful for the opportunity to have a role in helping her students believe that no book is too big and no story is too long.
“I just want them to be free thinkers,” she said. “I want them to be able to understand what society is about and different cultures and have an open mind to see the world differently, to see people differently, to see themselves differently. I want to make sure that if there’s something out there we can give our kids to help them be more successful, to help them just be happy, I’m all for it. If I can turn one student a day into a reader, it’s a good day.”