Reading Outreach and a Freebie

So I have been MIA all week long. We had Vacation Bible School this past week and I was exhausted from it. Our church does something a little different and we create all our own materials. We don't use a prepackaged theme but create it all. Chris and our Pastor come up with the theme. This year it was "A Tennessee Hillbilly in King David's Court." I'm amazed by my husband's creativity. He writes skits for all the nights. This year King David was "The King" like Elvis. It was hilarious and so much fun. I worked in the nursery. This was my third year there and it wore me out. My sister in law and I decided next year we were doing something different. Like crafts. We were tired of saying no don't hit and share over and over. So between that and working in my room I just didn't have the energy for the blogging. I can only imagine what it's going to be like when school starts.
I am on the board of our local library and this summer along with another teaching friend, Cassie, we've been working on a summer reading program. It started out as a program to bring books out in the community to the kids that live in hotels that have been turned into weekly rentals. (I live in a tourist town.) These motels aren't the greatest places to live and these kids don't have access to books in their home. Most of them are living in a one room with no kitchen and not enough beds. But as we went out in the community to talk to people and get the word out, we found that there weren't as many kids living in this motels this summer. They  closed down one of the larger motels and a lot of the kids moved. So the first week we went out we had no kids. The second week we went out we had no volunteers. But the third week, we tried something a little different. One of our stops was an apartment complex where some of our ELL students live. We talked to their parents and we had 5 kids come down. (Which was really good because we had 7 volunteers.) This seemed to be the direction we should be moving.

 So this week we changed our locations up some. We went to this location above and then added another apartment complex. We had 3 more kids this week. The best thing that has happened was one of the boys told us he didn't like to read before. But reading with us has changed that. It made my heart smile! I know that whatever we did this was worth it.

We're hoping to adapt some and be able to do something when school starts back. We have one more week with this program and I'm excited to see what will happen.
Before starting the reading program, we held a training session with all the volunteers. We modeled a way that we wanted the volunteers to read with the students. It was adapted from Richard Allington's book What Really Matters for Struggling Readers. 

I made a book mark with the prompts on it. I think that I'm going to use it if/when I have volunteers come in the classroom to read with students. I thought I would share it in case someone else wanted to use it. 

Click here to get the freebie. 

I have about 2 weeks before I got back to work officially. We have a staff retreat week after this coming week and then I go to the beach for one last hurrah. Then it's school time. So much to do in the next few weeks. One thing I need to catch up on is my Next Step in Guided Reading book reading. I've gotten behind. Hopefully I'll be back with a post soon. I hope to have some Monday Made its at least and some classroom pictures.