World Read Aloud Day

The biggest part of my career has been spent working with elementary teachers and students.  I loved it.  There was so much you could do when a classroom was self-contained.  One of the highlights of my year was centered around Dr. Seuss' birthday.  I started way back when by having community members come in to read to a class and deliver every student a book to take home.  It took weeks of planning, but it was worth every smile from the readers as well as the students.

Not long after that, I became more active on Twitter (back when Twitter was mainly edtech professionals).  I took note of all of the amazing things that were happening in the educational community simply because we could connect with people outside of our area.  I got the idea to expand my face-to-face read alouds and make them virtual.  I put the call out on Twitter, made a few connections through email and one awesome experience was born.  

The event lasted for two weeks.  I would schedule classes based upon the needs of my reader as well and the teacher's schedule.  The last year I did this we had readers from 24 states and 3 continents.  We had North Carolina's State Superintendent, Mike Artell the author, a professional baseball player and his wife, along with classrooms and teachers from all over the country read to our students.  We used this as an opportunity to teach students about the locations of our readers by marking their location on a map and talking about the distance from our school.  We got into discussions about time zones, the different continents and culture.  I did this with the K-2 school I worked with for about 3 years.

Since I've been at a middle school, I've missed opportunities like this.  It's more difficult because of scheduling and time constraints, but this year I decided to give it a try.  February 1st was World Read Aloud Day.  I met with our Language Arts teachers and pitched the idea to see who would be interested.  Once I knew they were on board, I worked with the media coordinators at our K-2 and 3-5 schools to recruit classes for my students to read to.  This was a first for most of the people involved.  

Once we had the teachers and the times, I worked on a schedule so that we could have at least one of my classes read to their partner class.  I also created a quick video to show teachers on both ends how to make the call in Google Hangouts and to show them what to expect.  The media coordinators at each site were on standby for technical support.  Some of my teachers were comfortable to make the call on their own while others decided to do their read aloud in the media center.  I was really impressed by the effort the student readers put into trying to entertain their partner class.  

This is definitely something we will try again.  I'd like to see the collaboration happen with other middle schools outside of our county on content specific projects.