You may remember the calls for book donations earlier this spring. Those were a part of WAKE Up and Read’s second annual book drive.
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WAKE Up & Read exceeded their goal and collected well over 100,000 books at 150 collection sites around Wake County. They distributed ten books to every child at nine elementary schools, twenty childcare centers, and nine community centers. You read that right. Home libraries are being built for thousands of children!
In addition, WAKE Up and Read held the second annual Letterland event at Pullen Park. Letterland is a curriculum that teaches reading, writing, and spelling to young children. Each letter is a unique character and they all live in an imaginary land called? You guessed it – Letterland! On May 16th, Pullen Park was transformed into Letterland for a day and thousands of families came for a visit.
WAKE Up and Read also collaborated on several school readiness playdates at Marbles Kids Museum. Kick-off to Kindergarten events in June and August attracted more than 4,000 attendees. And, they were responsible for the Lawyers Read program (where lawyers met weekly to read with children), training for early literacy staff, and multiple parent education sessions.
This work is accomplished by the amazing collaborative that is WAKE Up and Read. More than twenty organizations work together as a local affiliate of the national Campaign for Grade-Level Reading. The Campaign is a collaborative effort by foundations, nonprofit partners, business leaders, government agencies, states and communities across the nation. They do that by focusing on school readiness, school attendance, and summer learning loss with the ultimate goal of increasing the number students reading at grade by the end of third grade.
And the work that WAKE Up and Read has gotten attention as one of twenty groups out of 176 that are active in the Campaign for Grade Level Reading as a Pacesetter Awardee. The award was given for making “measurable progress” on student reading outcomes.
WakeEd is a proud community partner in WAKE Up and Read. We\’re proud to partner, and we\’re proud to be making a difference for children in Wake County.