I cut, stack, and laminate (or I have the lovely volunteers at our school help with it.)
About a week before Literacy Night, I start putting samples and materials together. I go shopping and buy everything we need. I put together the bags for the door (including a bookmark and a reading pledge). I talk to our librarian to make sure we're ready with the free books we give away - one to each child. And I put together the snack station.
This year's snack was this adorable craft:
To make it, I stuffed plastic snack-sized bags with a popsicle stick (for spreading frosting), a mini chocolate doughnut, a pretzel stick, and a handful of goldfish. I also cut up little pieces of white paper for the sail and purchased the little paper plates and frosting.
I downloaded How I Became a Pirate to play in the background while the kids were working on their snack.
At the front door, our librarian handed out books to our kids!
This was the Treasure Map station: a fun word family game. Kids made the pieces by cutting them out of yardstick and then put them in a paper bag. The kids and parents took turns drawing cards to fill up their treasure maps!
Kids and parents read these fun pirate partner plays with their hats and hooks on!
This was our reading station: Pirate Cove. We set up comfy chairs and spots to sit and read and provided baskets of books. Our super art teacher made this ship, too!
This station was a huge hit: Digging for Buried Treasure. I took two plastic wading pools and had some helpers fill them with balled-up butcher paper in yellow and brown (to represent sand).
Then I copied these gems and coins on cardstock and mixed them up in the paper balls.
Teachers read a card with a prefix (at the big kids station) or a rhyming word (at the little kids station) and kids dug through the pools to find the matching words!
At the last station, kids wrote adorable stories about how they became pirates and then they made a paper plate pirate!
Want to learn more? Check out my How to Plan an Awesome Family Night video!
It's Saturday morning and I am absolutely beat. I've fitted my tush into the grooves in the couch and already zoned out to two episodes of Law and Order SVU (both equally traumatizing).
I'm on cup of coffee number one, about half-coffee and half-cinnabon flavored creamer. The season is changing into the time of year where I will eat anything with a Halloween/turkey/Christmas wrapper, anything cinnamon, anything brown sugar, anything apple or pumpkin.
I plan to spend the next three months being incredibly nostalgic.
Why am I so pooped? Last night was one of my favorite school events of the year. Every fall is our schoolwide Family Literacy Night.
I LOVE Literacy Night. In the week leading up to it, I am a psychotic nutjob, creating, copying, cutting, stuffing, stacking, and shopping.
The day of I compulsively organize and tape, set up, and assign. And the
day after I want to crawl into a little hole and sleep for a month.
This is what we did for our Literacy Night this year, which was movie themed.
The day of Literacy Night, some of my awesome teachers helped me hang up butcher paper "curtains" and roll out a "red carpet" of butcher paper and black masking tape. We decorated the doorway to the gym and the doorway to the cafeteria; both of these locations were hosting events.
When kids arrived at the front doors with their parents, they received a bag with a bookmark with reading tips, their reading pledges, and a ticket with the time marked on it "movie showing" in the cafeteria. Each student received a free book, too!
Every single person also received a ticket for a free bag of popcorn! Our lovely office ladies popped and bagged 400 bags of popcorn earlier in the day!
After they collected their popcorn, our guests could move through seven different and fun stations to practice important literacy skills in speaking, listening, reading, and writing!
Puppet Buddies
In our puppet buddies station, kids and parents listened to Curious George Goes to the Movies read aloud and created puppets of George and the man in the yellow hat to retell the story.
Actin' It Up
I wrote a couple short Reader's Theater scripts for two parts. One of them (for the big kids) was Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, and the other was a little story of a mother duck and her baby duckling. The kids and parents got to make a little headband with their character on the front, and then they read the play with the two parts.
Sight Word Pop
This one is a classic! Like the Bang Bag activity for sight words, families made a paper bag full of sight words and cards that said, "Pop!" They took turns drawing cards from the bag and reading the sight words. If they drew a card that said, "Pop!", they had to put all their cards back.
Concession Stand Creations
This station was made into a contest. Students received a piece of white cardstock and used it to create a candy bar wrapper of their own creation. Then they wrote their name and grade on it and put it in a stack with other wrappers from their grade level. These posters are available in English and Spanish so you can host your own family night red carpet event!
The next day, we judged the entries, chose a first place winner from each grade, and gave them a fun popcorn tub full of snacks, a book, and a deck of cards for a family night!
Lights, Camera, Read!
This is the easiest station! Our stage had been decorated with stars and gold fringe for an awards celebration we'd had the week before, so we didn't have to decorate! We just set up cozy furniture, rugs, and lamps, and let kids and parents choose books and read together!
Storyboard
At this station, teachers read aloud the story, Amelia Makes a Movie. Then the students used a cute storyboard format to "make" their own movie!
Movie Night
This was the biggest challenge to set up.
The week before Literacy Night, I stuffed little zip plastic bags with food that has holes in it! Fruit Loops, pretzels, lifesavers, and a cookie with a hole in the middle. Each student received one bag and a length of yarn that the kids could make into a "Movie Snack Necklace." How fun is that?
My wonderful hunny, who does video and photo for events, helped me create a fun movie with previews to watch. I used book trailers I found on youtube and he created a cute screen before each one that said, "This book preview has been approved for all audiences. You can check these books out from your school library!" After three or four book trailers, we showed our "feature presentation". It was this video of Strega Nona, read by Tomie DePaola.
These are some of the great book trailers I found on Youtube:
We had almost 200 kids and 400 people attend our Literacy Night! We had a blast, and even though we were exhausted afterward, it's worth it to get kids and families talking about reading!
Want to learn more? Check out my How to Plan an Awesome Family Night video!
If there's one thing I love, it's a good theme. In my own classroom, the theme was "bees". Obviously.
But every year, my librarian buddy and I try to plan a new and fun theme for the kids to center our reading events around.
We make bulletin boards, celebrate the 25 Book Campaign with the theme, and even plan our Family Literacy Night around it, too.
Last year, (yes, it's been a whole year and I haven't blogged about this yet - give me a break, I got married :) our reading theme was Superheroes!
Superheroes are a great theme, because what kid doesn't want to be a superhero? It also lends itself to lots of fun, creative activities and events.
In this post, I'll share a little bit about how we used this superhero theme to build excitement about reading!
We also used it for our Family Literacy Night, which is our BIG literacy event each year!
We used superhero bulletin boards for everything - our GIANT 25 Book Campaign recognition board:
We divided up the space into months and posted each teacher's name under the month. After the 25 Book Campaign for that month had been turned in, we took pictures of each class' students who participated! They were proud to be featured on our board!
Our welcome back to reading board at the front of the school:
And of course, our Family Literacy Night. The year before, we had a Camping Themed Literacy Night, but this year, our theme was Super Family Literacy!
The week before the evening we were celebrating literacy, I created student bookmarks, tickets, pledges and stuffed brightly colored (donated) plastic bags with the materials they would need for the evening.
I put the reading pledge sheet and the bookmark inside the bag. Some (about 15) of the Reading Pledges had a pumpkin sticker in the corner.
If a child received a pledge with a pumpkin sticker, he/she could choose a free book to take home when they turned it in!
To the outside, I stapled their "Super Snack" ticket. This ensures that each student actually gets one snack - if they get more than one, we'll run out and some won't get any.
We notified kids that they could wear their costumes because it was a couple days before Halloween. It was absolutely adorable.
As kids arrived, we handed out the bags and directed them gym floor to listen to the book, Dex: Heart of a Hero being read aloud. It was absolutely adorable - such a precious story about a wiener dog who decided enough is enough! He takes action to get stronger and quicker, and of course ends up saving the day.
After that, we directed them to complete several of the seven stations we had available to develop literacy and family fun! After completing each station, each child received several pieces of candy in their bags (we had plastic pumpkins full of candy and spider rings at each station). They carried their bags from place to place, completing stations, collecting candy, and having fun!
This was our Smack Attack Station: here, students listened to words being read from cards by the teacher, and then used the superhero-decorated flyswatter to smack the rhyming word!
At our Secret Identities Station, students decorated a cardstock cutout of a mask and used yarn to wear it!
We Need a Hero! required students to create a superhero using alliteration and then illustrate a cover for a comic book!
Everything we do, we do in English and Spanish to grow bilingualism in our students and help our Spanish-speaking parents communicate with their children about these activities.
At this station, This Looks Like a Job For..., students used a sentence strip to create a comic book about a superhero!
At the Super Snack Station, kids decorated cookies to look like superhero symbols! Each student received one snack ticket as they arrived, stapled to their bag. When they arrived, we collected the ticket to help make sure we didn't have repeat customers at the snack station!
Of course, we had a building words station! Kids wrote "Superheroes read" on a sentence strip and cut between the letters to make cards. Then they built as many words as they could using those letters - parents actually got pretty competitive here!
Our most simple station was the Reading Headquarters. We used the gym stage and added some cozy furniture and a rug to make it an inviting area to read in!
We added some baskets of high-interest books and (here's the best part) made capes out of plastic tablecloths and yarn!
Students donned a cape and read a book with their buddies in Reading Headquarters! Even some of our older students enjoyed doing this!
A week or so later, I finally took all the pictures, pledges, and student products we had been given, and created our Super Family Literacy Night display in one of our glass display cases!
Want to learn more? Check out my How to Plan an Awesome Family Night video!
Arrr you ready for Pirate Family Literacy Night? 
