By Ryan McCormick ’14
Photo by Ally Hill ‘15 | The Lafayette
Forty-seven children from Easton came to campus last Saturday for Literacy Day, where Lafayette students organized programs to introduce them to current concerns in the local and global community.
The event, run by the National Education Association’s Read Across America program and Landis Staff, is intended to encourage children to read and think about their environment.
Five teenagers also attended the newly created Teen Conference, which was run in association with Literacy Day.
Every year the program focuses on a different book as a central theme. The book this year was “Hip-Hop Speaks to Children” by Nikki Giovanni. According to Director of America Reads, America Counts Christine Cohen, every child took home a hardcover copy of the book with a CD and a Literacy Day T-shirt. Cohen hopes that the children “left with a desire to read and to continue to develop and explore their own sense of literacy.”
Literacy Day was divided into individual programs run by different volunteer organizations including Lafayette Environmental Awareness Program, Society of Environmental Engineers Scientists, Lafayette African & Caribbean Students Association, Association of Black Collegians, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Brothers Of Lafayette, Kaleidoscope, and Pi Beta Phi.
Each organization was responsible for creating an activity for the children to participate in, according to volunteer coordinator BlairGallante ‘15. For example, LEAP had participants learn about the seasons and then go to individual stations with a selection of books written about the seasons. After that, the participants created a mural based on their favorite animals and places in nature.
Pi Beta Phi hosted a similar project, where the children illustrate pictures based on their favorite poem from a poetry book.
The projects covered a wide variety of topics. SEES had the participants design and then build their own water filter. The project was concerned with getting students to think about ways they could conserve water or reduce pollution. With the completion of the assignment, each student could either write a haiku, or draw a picture of one of their favorite places in nature and brainstorm ideas on how it could be conserved.
“Literacy Day isn’t just about reading,” volunteer coordinator Susanna Kim ‘15 said. “It’s about engaging kids through creative activities, encouraging relationships between Lafayette students and the community, and promoting the love of learning and exploring new ideas.”