This post comes from Maggie McGuire, Vice President of Kids and Parent Channels at Scholastic. Scholastic employees are always looking for ways to “Be Big” and taking action to make a difference in the community.

Maggie spent eight years in the educational arena as a Language Arts and Literature teacher (grades 7 to 10) and as a teacher trainer and curriculum development designer before working at Scholastic.

I had the great pleasure of participating in H. Newman School’s Read & Rise Book Fair and Family Night on Wednesday. It couldn’t have been a more inspiring night with families coming together to invest time in sharing and learning more about how they can support their child’s reading and learning life.

This is a personal passion of mine – one that has translated into a career spent focused on ways to inspire a love of and excitement for learning and to provide families with access to the information and books they need to be successful.

The event kicked off with a lively discussion amongst parents and family members talking about the incredibly important roles families have in shaping their child’s motivation to read and learn from the earliest ages.

Parents are a child’s first teacher.

Parents talked about sharing family stories from their childhood as one way to get kids involved in listening to stories, asking questions, learning how to participate in conversations and learning about their heritage – as well as sharing their own stories. We all acknowledged that the more families talk to their children, every day, and share in conversations with their children – whether at the family kitchen table or on the go, the more children will acquire the language, vocabulary, thinking and communication skills necessary to becoming literate.

Other parents shared the importance of reading every day with their kids. Whether it is a newspaper, magazine, comic book, novel or picture book – getting kids reading and making it a fun family ritual, and part of every day life, is what is important.

If kids love reading and learning – they’ll be on a path to success. Everyone felt very passionate about wanting to be a positive reading role model for their kids. One parent summed it up so well, “Readers are leaders! And that’s what we all want for our kids.”

Following that conversation, families came together to create original stories together and craft them into their very own books in a Klutz Build-A-Book workshop.

This is where all the things we talked about started to come to life with the kids. I had a great time working with two funny and intent boys who were putting together a whimsical story about characters who lived in “La La Land and Upside Down World”. Just their banter back and forth about what they were creating was a perfect example of how to build literacy, problem solving skills, and tap into imagination when we set out to create and tell stories.

By encouraging them with questions about what they were making and the characters they were building – they came up with a really great start to a very imaginative story.

Being a part of a community effort to support literacy is remarkably rewarding. Not only was I captivated by the school’s community of parents and kids, but it was wonderful to be part of a larger team of Scholastic employees who volunteered to set up the Fair, host the Build-A-Book workshop and help kids find and choose just the right books for their age and interest at the Book Fair. The kids were so excited to look through a large selection of books – they loved talking to each other about which ones they’d read, which ones had been on their wishlist, and all of them walked out with one in their hands. What a great way to end an evening focused on raising readers!