Activities for Family Literacy Day
Family Literacy Day promotes reading within the home. Celebrated in both Canada and the United States, your location should not stop you from celebrating. Literacy is a worldwide concern. Engage children and adults alike in reading through Family Literacy Day activities. The American day is on November 1st, and the Canadian version is on January 27th. Does this Spark an idea?
Other People Are Reading
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Book Collection
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Get family members together with other families in your neighborhood to see which household can collect the most books to donate. Have a family host the donation box for the week during which Family Literacy Day falls. Throughout that week, families bring new or gently used books to the host's home. At the end of the week, the family that collected the most books might get a special certificate or a gift card for a local bookstore. Take the donated books to a local library, retirement center, school or hospital.
Read-a-thon
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Plan to set aside Family Literacy Day as a day without television or computers in your home. Each family member spends their time reading during the evening and discussing the books read. Encourage children to summarize and retell the story they read. Being able to glean the main idea and a basic plot from a longer story is a key comprehension skill that will help children understand the assigned readings in their school classes. Make the reading event festive by piling pillows on the floor and preparing special reading snacks such as popcorn or homemade trail mix.
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Book Clubs
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For families with teenage children, choose a book at their reading level for all the family members to read and discuss each night during the week of Family Literacy Day. Look for book club questions about your reading selection from the Internet, book clubs in your area or ask an English teacher for discussion question ideas for a particular book. For families with children of various ages, look for book clubs for younger children that read books on a middle school or elementary school reading level. Children in these book clubs have age-appropriate books to read and questions to discuss. Look for book clubs for children and adults in local bookstores and at public libraries.
Word Games
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Spend Family Literacy Day playing word games that rely on the vocabulary built through reading. Younger children can do word searches while older children and adults can play games such as crossword puzzles, crossword board games such as Scrabble and word-find games such as Boggle.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit reading image by Alison Bowden from Fotolia.com
