The Manchester Elementary Middle School (MEMS) is pulling out all the stops in its celebration of National Reading Month. As one of the six schools in the Bennington-Rutland Supervisory Union (BRSU), all students and staff at MEMS are reading the best selling children’s book: The Wild Robot by Peter Brown.
“It’s all part of our month-long celebration National Reading Month,” says Jessica Kuzmich, Chair of the BRSU’s English and Language Arts Committee. “The idea is to use March to build a community devoted to reading — students, staff, and whole families too.”
Enter the MEMS Family Literacy Dinner. With the help of the MEMS Parent Teacher Organization, the school hosted a dinner at the school to celebrate reading. On Thursday, March 14th, local restaurants helped with food and volunteers stepped forward to manage the logistics involved with feeding and entertaining over 400 guests.
The invitees circulated through school hallways decorated with pine trees and images of the animals featured in the book: otters, bears, beavers, and geese -- and too many robots to count. There were rooms designated for arts and crafts, a scavenger hunt, reading in the library, raffles with literary prizes, and the gym turned into a disco -- with a chance to dance with the hero of the book, “Roz” the Robot.
Who says reading can’t be fun.
(Photo above: Carrie Gutbier, Youth Services Librarian for the Manchester Community Library, attended the MEMS Literacy Dinner as a “guest reader.”)
Staff and parents volunteered to serve dinner for some 400 guests at the MEMS Family Literacy Dinner.
BRSU English Language Arts Chair Jessica Kuzmich joins Mark Wade and daughters Taliyah and Tianna at the MEMS Family Literacy Dinner.
Attendees of MEMS Family Literacy Dinner — especially the children — were thrilled with the opportunity to dance in the gymnasium with “Roz" the Robot, the star of "The Wild Robot."