On Monday we started our 5th Annual One School One Book (OSOB) reading event. This program was started by the awesome Kim Nees, who was the librarian here at Sugar Creek before me, and now this is my second year doing it. OSOB is a school wide family based reading event where the entire school reads the same book at the same time. Each family gets one copy of the same book and reading about 1 chapter each night along a reading schedule. At school there is lots of discussion about the book, daily trivia with prizes on the morning news and opening and closing assemblies.
This year we are reading "The Enormous Egg" by Oliver Butterworth. We had our opening assembly on Monday and the kids received their books the same day. The assembly was super fabulous! My awesome related arts team helped me with a super cute skit, about the Rooser, Ezekiel, played by the Awesome Ms. McNinch, and the rest of the family discovering the enormous egg one morning on their farm. The kids loved it and were talking about Ms. McNinch as a rooster all day long. Even today, 3 days later they are still talking about the book and trying to guess what is inside the egg (they will find out when the egg hatches in the chapter they read tonight :)) As we read the book together at home, at school there is fun trivia, and contest and different teachers tie the book into their lessons in different ways. For example I am using dinosaurs as the theme for my non-fiction vs fiction research unit with my first graders this month.
I overall love the One School One Book program, I think its a great way to get families reading together and families reading together is so important for early literacy and instilling that love of reading into students. It shows kids that parents care about reading at that its important (Which it so is!).
One School One Book is fairly simple to implement at your school, its sponsored by the Read to Them foundation, and there _is a one time $500 membership fee. That fee lets you get discounts on books that you can buy from them and access to all of their supplemental materials. For this year I used their skit ideas, their parent letter home and their trivia. I have ordered by books from somewhere else the past two years. This year we ordered them from book-pal.com, and they worked out great and were less than $4 per book.
I hope to post pictures of our opening assembly as soon as my colleague who took them gets them to me!
This year we are reading "The Enormous Egg" by Oliver Butterworth. We had our opening assembly on Monday and the kids received their books the same day. The assembly was super fabulous! My awesome related arts team helped me with a super cute skit, about the Rooser, Ezekiel, played by the Awesome Ms. McNinch, and the rest of the family discovering the enormous egg one morning on their farm. The kids loved it and were talking about Ms. McNinch as a rooster all day long. Even today, 3 days later they are still talking about the book and trying to guess what is inside the egg (they will find out when the egg hatches in the chapter they read tonight :)) As we read the book together at home, at school there is fun trivia, and contest and different teachers tie the book into their lessons in different ways. For example I am using dinosaurs as the theme for my non-fiction vs fiction research unit with my first graders this month.
I overall love the One School One Book program, I think its a great way to get families reading together and families reading together is so important for early literacy and instilling that love of reading into students. It shows kids that parents care about reading at that its important (Which it so is!).
One School One Book is fairly simple to implement at your school, its sponsored by the Read to Them foundation, and there _is a one time $500 membership fee. That fee lets you get discounts on books that you can buy from them and access to all of their supplemental materials. For this year I used their skit ideas, their parent letter home and their trivia. I have ordered by books from somewhere else the past two years. This year we ordered them from book-pal.com, and they worked out great and were less than $4 per book.
I hope to post pictures of our opening assembly as soon as my colleague who took them gets them to me!