“”World records are not easy things to break. The difficulty did not stop almost 400 students and staff at North Woods International School from participating in the 13th annual Jumpstart Read for the Record. The all-day school event brought the North Woods family together to read, laugh, and learn as they participated in the world’s largest shared reading experience.
Students were able to join a story walk, combining the pleasure of reading the book aloud while walking together outdoors. A story walk is a fun, educational activity that places the pages from a children’s story along a walking route around the outside of the school. The story walk helps build student interest in reading while encouraging healthy outdoor activity and promoting the school’s theme of unity for both children and adults.
“This is another great way to connect children to reading,” said North Woods International teacher Sara DePaolo. “Active learning is a goal at North Woods, and we hope this will spark continued interest in not only story walks at school but develop some lifelong readers as well.”
This year’s Read for the Record event at North Woods utilized the school’s new permanent story walk installation. Funded through a grant from the La Crosse Public Education Foundation and Coulee Bank, the story walk feature was added earlier this month at the school to get all students involved with reading in a fun and engaging way regardless of their reading level. The story walk feature helps add an additional 800 hours of reading at North Woods this year.
Each year, Jumpstart selects one children’s book as the catalyst for Read for the Record. This year’s book selection, “Maybe Something Beautiful”, by F. Isabel Campoy and Theresa Howell, and illustrated by Rafael López, celebrates the magic that can happen when a community comes together to create something beautiful and bring about change — a fitting metaphor for a campaign that features thousands of events in communities across the country each year.
The annual campaign was launched over a decade ago to highlight the importance of building early literacy and language skills for every child. In 2013, Jumpstart broke the world reading record with 2,462,860 children and adults included in the shared reading experience. North Woods’ participation this year will help to try and break that record. Each year, the event brings together over 2 million people in classrooms, libraries, community centers, and homes across the United States.””””[vc_gallery type=”flexslider_slide” interval=”0″ images=”14676,14667,14674,14668,14675,14670,14669,14673,14671,14677″ img_size=”625×417″]””
