If it’s hard to remember what it’s like to be in the first grade, here are the broad strokes: it’s an era of asking a lot of “why” questions, specifying your age with “and a half,” and needing a little extra help with winter wear.
When interviewing on Zoom, Amanda Queenie — a first grade teacher at Mountain Village School — helped students zip up their coats as she spoke. She sees every day how, in addition to being really into Paw Patrol, first grade is also when the students start becoming curious about books. In first grade, students learn the fundamentals of reading that they will continue to build before textbook learning.
“So this part is just crucial down here, of that part, and I think that having these books just brings a level of excitement,” Queenie said.
Like many schools across the country, Mountain Village School, part of the Lower Yukon School District, used to have a book fair. Typically, a national organization like Scholastic would send books for schools to display in a pop-up book store. About five years ago, Queenie said that Scholastic announced that they would no longer cover the cost of shipping books, which made the event too costly for Mountain Village, located off of the United States road system in the already-pricy-to-ship-to state of Alaska. Queenie said that she understands the reasoning behind the decision, but the 200-person school missed the book fair. Families asked about it and the school continued to look for ways to bring it back.
“It just kind of was one of those things where Alys this fall said, ‘Would you like to have a book fair?’ And I snapped it up right away, because we’ve been looking for options, asking all kinds of different people and entities, and no one ever, you know, follows through,” Queenie said.
Alys Culhane is the executive director of Bright Lights Book Project, a Palmer-based nonprofit that began by rehoming books found at the local recycling center. Eventually the idea blossomed into a project of collecting discarded or donated books from schools and libraries across Alaska to be redistributed to communities in need of reading material.
In the past, Culhane had worked with Queenie to deliver boxes of books to the school now and again. Then, earlier this fall, the two started scheming up a way to use the donated books to bring back the book fair.
“What we’re doing is we’re embracing literacy by making books available to kids,” Culhane said. “They then own these books; they can begin their own libraries. Their parents are excited, the teachers are excited, and this is going to assist in getting them to be, to be readers.”
Bright Light Book Project donated around 600 copies of everything from board books to chapter books to be displayed at the fair. Last year, the nonprofit was awarded a state Senate appropriations grant, allowing the project to focus on getting books to Alaska’s more remote communities. Culhane traveled to Mountain Village for the project and spent the lead-up to the book fair reading with Queenie’s first grade class.
“We finished setting up this afternoon, and as all the kids would pass by in the hall, their eyes got really big, just ‘what’s going on in the library!’” Queenie said.
Beginning Jan.16, students of all ages got to “shop” at the three-day book fair, selecting titles that they could take home for free. Students could also purchase things like erasers, Play-Doh, and pencils as part of a school fundraiser to support the Dolly Parton Imagination Library — a national nonprofit that Mountain Village also partners with to get books into families’ homes at no cost to the students.
Queenie said that the fair was a massive success: all but a few books were left after just the first two days of the event, and the school didn’t end up opening the fair for its planned third day. She said that she hopes this book fair model and the partnership with Bright Lights Book Project can be an inspiration to other schools off of the road system.
This post was originally published on here
