B.'s Big Read!

Funded Nov 10, 2021

Thanks so much to #TeachHealthy with Nature Made for making this project possible! The faculty, staff and students at my middle school were elated to participate in a school-wide "Big Read" and if your company hadn't supplied the 515 copies of Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds, that wouldn't have been possible.

Our students were highly engaged in numerous activities related to the book and always had rich discussions and opinions about the story. The book was a novel-in-verse about a teen dealing with a personal tragedy. His reaction to this tragedy was where the conflict began. Using this text for our Big Read allowed our school community to focus on what it meant to make decisions and live with the consequences of those decisions--good or bad. Meaningful agreements (and disagreements) ensued... which was great!

Doing a Big Read also allowed teachers across the curriculum to model reading comprehension strategies such as predicting, summarizing, inferring, commenting, questioning, evaluating and analyzing text structure. They were able to delve deep into various themes via literary analysis as well.

Again, thank you for supporting us and for supporting literacy. We are eternally grateful.”

With gratitude,

Ms. Lawrence