“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

This quote from Dr. Seuss captures the delight and goal of our mission to cultivate a love for learning through the lens of reading. One way we celebrate the importance of reading at The Brook Hill Lower School is to set aside one special week to focus solely on fostering that wonder for words. This special week: Great Book Week, ran from October 28 – November 1st this year and is truly one of the highlights of our semester at the Lower School!

We celebrated with several different events this past week. First, our storybook character pumpkins took the stage in our Lower School Library throughout the week allowing students to vote on their favorite.

Tuesday, award-winning Christian author, Shelly Roark, visited the library to share her newest book, “Gracie Lou Wants a Zoo” to PreK through second-grade classes.

Our week culminated today with an assembly in the gym for our annual “Great Book Parade” featuring PreK through first-grade classes! Each of these classes had the opportunity to showcase a special book through their costumes. Activities like this, connecting the characters from pages to people in real life, is such a fun way to create a framework for reading. It strengthens their imagination and deepens their perspective every time a book feels “alive”.

We also love how events like this allow our students to work in groups and collaborate with both their classmates and students from across the student body as a whole. Earlier this week, many of our older students partnered with a younger student to share the love of reading. One teacher commented that a fifth-grader was heard saying, after working with a Prek student, “This was the best day of my life!”

This kind of week wouldn’t be possible without our Library Media Specialist, Ila England, who goes above and beyond to encourage engaged readers at our Lower School. She works to create special programs and activities that make characters come alive, and we’re grateful to have her on our team.

Thank you, parents, for what you do every day to encourage reading. We are especially appreciative of the PreK through first-grade teachers and parents for helping to make our Friday parade a success, and we’re also so grateful for the families who took time out of their busy schedules to help create a storybook character pumpkin. Our students love this event!

The winners for the Storybook Pumpkin Contest were: Librarian’s Pick Kyndal Mroczenski for James and the Giant Peach,3^rd Place Alex Freimer for Pikachu, 2^nd Place Haley Cooper for The Grinch, 1^st Place Jackson Aldredge!