My Immobile Bookmobile

I'm actually calling it a Summer Reading Cafe. I read an article recently that posed the theory the reason our low income kiddos are always behind their higher income counterparts is due to summer vacation. You see children of wealthier families spend the summers traveling, going to museums, reading books. Children in low-income neighborhoods just don't have access to the same resources. Now, I've heard people say "libraries are free" and this is entirely true-however not only do you have to have access to transportation to get to one, they also require identification that some parents do not have to provide. We were talking about this one day and the subject of Bookmobiles came up. And a lightbulb went off over my head! Now I knew I couldn't drive around with a box of books in my backseat and we have over half our kiddos who come to us from outside our zone-that would be a lot of driving.

Instead  I wrote a Donorschoose proposal for books and decided that the the kids could come to me and check them out. My choices included those that I know kids have liked in the past and some of my faves. I have those books available to students for check-out one day a week throughout the summer. I visited classrooms to explain and promote our program and the kids were so excited. They would ask "for free?"--yes, for free! So today was our first day-we are going to open up part of our school once a week for 2 hours. Some kids read the books they picked out, some spent the time reading e-books online. Overall, I think it was a great experience!

Their choices of books (I covered it with the red paper because I didn't want them walking away during summer school).

We usually use a program called MyOn but of course, that wasnt' working. I did put them on Tumblebooks instead.

She is a page counter like me! I read 16 pages already Miss Trayers!