VERO BEACH — Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known the world over as Dr. Seuss, has brought joy to generations of young readers, so it is no surprise that his birthday, March 2, has been named National Read Across America Day by the National Education Association.
To promote the occasion locally, pre-school and elementary school aged children, parents and teachers gathered last Monday evening at the Vero Beach High School Performing Arts Center for the Moonshot Moment Family Reading Party hosted by The Learning Alliance.
The guest speaker at the event was another highly acclaimed children’s book author and illustrator – Marc Brown, author of the Arthur book series.
Brown is a three-time Emmy award winner for the Arthur TV series adapted from the books, and later shared that he keeps the Emmy’s “on top of his tax returns.”
As people gathered outside the PAC to enjoy pizza and chicken sandwiches, the most popular “kids on the block” were Glendale Elementary School principal Adam Faust, dressed for the occasion as The Cat in the Hat, his sidekicks, Thing One and Thing Two, aka Marie O’Brien and Tabitha Johnston, and the oversized Chick-Fil-A ‘cow’.
“We have 600 people registered; we were hoping for 250 so this is a wonderful turnout,” said Barbara Hammond, Executive Director of The Learning Alliance.
The Learning Alliance was the impetus for the Indian River County School District’s Moonshot Moment campaign to improve reading proficiency and have 90 percent of all third graders reading at grade level by the year 2018.
The campaign was recently honored with its second Community Pacesetter Award, presented by the National Campaign for Grade Level Reading.
“The success has just been unbelievably great; it’s exceeded our wildest dreams,” said Ray Oglethorpe, Learning Alliance board chairman.
“Just over three years ago we had nothing. Now it’s in all Indian River County elementary schools, with 4,000 children in kindergarten to third grade in the program, and we’ve had 250 teachers trained. The community, along with the school district, has just rallied around this to make it happen. We have a great superintendent in Fran Adams.”
Inside, little heads bobbing with Cat in the Hat-themed headbands, the audience was wiggly but attentive, clutching their copies of donated Arthur books.
“Today is the largest reading event in America,” said Adams, encouraging parents to read to their children at least 15 minutes each day.
Using a variation on a question and answer format, Brown punctuated answers to questions from letter writers over the years with slides of photos from his life and pages from his books, sharing tidbits such as the inspirations behind the characters in his books.
He also read excerpts and displayed pages from a couple of works in progress and from his newest book, In New York, and showed a few videos clips from TV shows.
Afterward, while birthday cupcakes awaited them outside, the little ones swarmed Brown like a literary rock star, as he graciously autographed his books and posed for mom-approved ‘selfies’ with his fans.
