As of late last week, students and townspeople have logged 241,950 minutes of reading toward our Million Minutes of Reading challenge! We hope to reach our goal by early spring and we need your help! Reading opens the doors to worlds of knowledge, dreams, and creativity. It is the one foundational skill upon which all others are built. Reading lets us reflect on our history, see visions of our future, and allows for the sharing of ideas.
How can you help? Read and keep track of your minutes! We have reading logs for children in grades K-8 that children can get from and turn back in to their teachers. Adult reading logs are available from anyone older than our middle school children through adults. Logs can be obtained from any of our schools, our Central Office, and from Clapp Memorial Library, which has partnered with us on this project.
What counts as reading? Anything! Reading aloud to our younger children counts for both the adult reader and the child hearing the story. Books, newspapers, magazines, even online reading counts! On Sunday night (I confess with one eye on the TV only to watch the Patriots end their season earlier than hoped), I participated in an online Twitter chat with educators primarily from Rhode Island, as well as from Wisconsin and Michigan at #edchatri. We spent an hour exchanging and building off one another's ideas about student-centered learning: what that looks like, how technology is used, and how we can encourage educators to provide those opportunities to our students. The moderator of the chat archived all our posts so we can go back and review them later. Participants posted ideas, links to blog posts on the subject of student-centered learning, and a final post led me to the launch of a new site, http://www.time2changeit.org/, designed to bring people together to stop cyberbullying, the final topic of the night. Needless to say, these initial 60 minutes of reading for me will lead to more reading and learning about the future and the promise of education in the 21st Century.
So stop by one of our schools, our Central Office, or Clapp Memorial Library to pick up a log, or download and printout out the student log or adult log from our web site: www.belchertownps.org and posted in the District Announcements area and use it to log your minutes! When finished, drop it off at any of these locations or email me: superintendent@belchertown.org with your weekly minutes. The goal is ambitious but, working together, we can do it! Feel like a million - read!
If you have any questions or comments about this post, please feel free to call me at 413.323.0423 or email me, using the link above.
Best regards, Dr. Judith Houle, Superintendent of Schools
PS - The School Committee will be meeting on Tuesday, January 22, 2013 at 7:00 pm in the library at Swift River Elementary School. Click here to see a copy of the agenda for the meeting.
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