Wild About Reading Read-A-Thon

March 7-11, 2016 ~ It's that time of year again, yep it's the 7th Annual Read-A-Thon at Midway Heights Elementary School! This year's theme is "Wild About Reading" and I couldn't ask for a better side kick and Partner in Education than Tanya Alberty! (We have two other Partners in Education, Boone County Fire Department and Spectrum that help make this week special too!)

Each year our theme rotates to make it interesting for the kiddos and to allow us to explore different ideas while encouraging reading! These read-a-thons are a lot of work but they are so worth it when you see how much fun the kids have and they love having guest readers in their classroom! This year we would do things a little differently and normally we would have one guest reader per day in each classroom and this year we were excited to team up with Missouri Conservation Department and the University of Missouri Raptor Rehabilitation program!

A few of our special guests this week were:

 Libby Robinson, Retired Kindergarten teacher from Midway Heights

Stephens College Soccer twins, Sierra and Savannah

Boone County Fire Battalion Chief Leake

Dayle Garrett, World War II veteran

and many more great people within our community helped make this week successful!

 On Tuesday we had Adam with the  Missouri Conservation Department come talk to the school about animals in Missouri. He brought furs from the animals native to our state!

This was really cool to be able to see and touch the various furs. 

Thank you Adam for coming to Midway Heights Elementary School! 

On Thursday we had Jessica, Abigail and Paige from the Raptor Rehabilitation Project at the University of Missouri bring a couple special guests to our school!
You can follow them on Facebook here: 
https://www.facebook.com/Raptor-Rehabilitation-Project-197410460308966/

 This is a Red Tailed Hawk named Jacob (female)!

This is a Great Horned Owl named Owliver (female)!

When the assembly was just about over the Partners in Education surprised the school with adopting Owliver for the year! This will provide the care and food she needs for one year! Midway Heights Elementary School is represented by the Student Council!

Midway Heights Elementary School is so lucky to have some incredible teachers (not all pictured) and staff at this little country school! Huge thank you to Anna for designing our rock star t-shirts... she drew the elephant and even has adult coloring books for sale on Etsy!

Thursday night would wrap up our Read-A-Thon with Literacy Night at the school! We would invite students and their families to enjoy games centered around reading! They made safari binoculars, drew pictures of their wild self, wrote stories, did Zumba, visited the Bookmobile and much more! It really was a fun night and thanks to Scholastic Books each child left with a free book that was age appropriate!

We gave the school a reading goal of 46,000 minutes during a 2-week Reading Challenge. If they met the school wide goal they would get to celebrate with a Kona Ice party! They barely squeaked over their reading goal and earned an awesome Kona Ice party!

Huge thank you to Chris and Cathy Cook for bringing not one but two Kona trucks to the school so we could make sure each child had time to enjoy their delicious snack!