LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — It's a big week for kids at Matt Kelly Elementary School. Not only are they celebrating Nevada Reading Week, but thanks to your donations, they're going home with six brand-new books to build their home libraries and share with their families.
As part of our "If You Give a Child a Book..." campaign, the Las Vegas community helped raise $32,000 to fund book fairs like this.
The school's principal, Jerrell Hall, tells me many of these students are thinking beyond themselves when they decide which books to pick. Here's what she had to say on Wednesday morning:
JUSTIN HINTON: I want to bring in the principal here, Jerrell Hall, to talk about what this means. I think this is our third book fair that we’ve done with you all. What does this mean to your students?
JERRELL HALL: Being that it’s the third one, there’s been a lot of momentum. The students were very excited for this week. [It] fell right on time with Nevada Reading Week, where we’re celebrating and doing a lot of reading, and there’s a lot of anticipatory buzz like, 'Well, I hope they have this book; I hope they have this book.' Maybe it was a title they saw at the last book fair that they didn’t get a chance to get; now they get to get it this time. And then just a bigger impact on the community as a whole as kids are talking about, 'Oh, I can’t wait to go home and share this book with my little brother, my little sister, my little cousin, my mom, my dad, older kids.' So it’s not even about just the kids in the room, it’s about the community as a whole as they get to go home and share more stories with their families.
HINTON: And that’s the cool thing that we were talking about a couple minutes ago. You were saying some of these kids are telling you the books that they’re picking are books that they know their younger siblings are going to want to read, or it’s a book that maybe mom or dad can read to them.
HALL: Absolutely. So again, just another opportunity to have that time to bond with family, build communities and then also when kids have the opportunity to choose the book they read, it increases their motivation to actually read them, so if they’re picking books like, 'I know my brother or sister would love this one,' it’s helping them build that early love for literacy, shared experience, and again just the more we read, the smarter we are so it’s a great opportunity for kids to take in more words.
HINTON: And we’ve talked about this on Good Morning Las Vegas, that these kids love the 'Dog Man' series. The author, Dav Pilkey, actually contributed a number of books, so every kid here is also going to get that book as well. And you’ve been having parties for that book.
HALL: Yeah, so that is also another great opportunity that came our way. So all throughout the week, the children when they come to the library, they have a Dog Man party where they get to get a free copy of that title in addition to picking the six books from the book fair, so it’s like a whopping seven books that kids are walking away with all from the generosity of our supporters — Channel 13, the Scripps [Howard] Foundation — we’re just very excited and fortunate that kids, we’re able to foster their love for reading, and we’re actually really seeing the impact of that in their grades. We have a program called Accelerated Reader where they take these reading comprehension tests. We have more and more kids that are meeting their monthly Accelerated Reader goal, so it’s really making a huge impact on the school in general.
HINTON: And that really is our goal here at Channel 13, to be able to help kids, really all across CCSD, to be able to gain that literacy knowledge and be able to be successful readers so that they can do anything in the world that they so desire.
Earlier this year, Good Morning Las Vegas anchor Anjali Patel visited Tom Williams Elementary School, where your donations helped 550 students go home with five books each. Hear what they had to say about their selections:
If you'd like to contribute to our "If You Give a Child a Book..." campaign, donations are open year-round. Any amount can help change a child's story.
