Camp Read A Lot

We have the BEST literacy specialist at our site…I mean truly the best!  She is super creative and fun and encouraging.  So, she wanted to plan a Camp Read A Lot.  I think she was smart in that she planned two night events… a lower elementary and an upper elementary one.  I helped out with the upper elementary one and we had a blast!  

We had 3 stations, an opening and closing time and Smokey the Bear even showed up!  She also made sure to invite the local library to come and they had sign ups for a library card and the summer reading program. #genius

So…this is how it was set up:  

After the families checked in with the camp ranger they came into the multi purpose room.  We had tents, ( christmas trees ) set up, etc.  We gathered together and sang camp songs via our guitar playing school secretary.  Then we broke up into 3 groups ( already assigned by color code on their ‘passports’.

The first group was in the multi purpose room:  They read in tents with their parents.  We turned off the lights and they used flash lights that we provided and there were pillows and sleeping bags in the tents.

The second group was the fishing for topics group.  They had fishing poles made from large branches with string and magnets at the end.  There were ponds for them to fish in and once they caught a fish ( topic ) they jumped on chrome books to google or kiddle facts about the topic.  They read non fiction text to gather their facts.

The third group was my group, the nature hike!  This group walked through the hallway with birds chirping and all ( hidden i pads with bird noises playing ).  We hung anchor charts for several topics and the parents and kids read short information texts and then wrote some facts about them on the matching anchor charts with markers.

We came back together at the end, sang campfire songs, had a backpack raffle ( full of books of course ) – we gave 5 backpacks away and lastly how can we forget we had SMORES!  It was a blast!  The families and kids loved it, we will be sure to do it again next year!