Dozens of families crowded the Ansonia Middle School gymnasium Saturday (March 23) for the Ansonia School Readiness Council’s fifth annual literacy fair, a Dr. Seuss birthday celebration that featured costumes, games, and, most importantly, reading.
Coordinator Diana Brancato said this year’s turnout was the best yet.
“The theme is different this year and that’s why more people are in tune,” she said. “Our numbers have never been this big; we’re so excited.”
Brancato said the literacy fair’s organizers thought celebrating Dr. Seuss would be a good fit to get families out.
The beloved, prolific Seuss — the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel — is appreciated across a number of age groups, she said.
“It’s a theme that a variety of age ranges can relate to as far as rhyming and the story lines and the characters,” Brancato said.
On one side of the middle school’s gymnasium, site supervisor Tracy Platt, dressed as The Cat in the Hat, greeted families and invited them to listen to professional storyteller Laconia Therrio read Dr. Seuss books.
Therrio said reading aloud with excitement and emotion is one of the best things a parent can do to expand a child’s education and imagination.
“The more kids hear their parents speaking, the more intelligent they become,” he said. “There’s something about narrative; when kids hear a story in narrative form I think they take it in more deeply.”
“The key is to figure how to get it out in a way that’s comfortable for them,” Therrio said. “When parents and teachers don’t read excitedly, then the kids don’t connect with it.”
Therrio also said reading and storytelling helps students with their sense of confidence, “especially for kids who are not the ‘A‑listers.’ They don’t make the good grades, their learning may be kinesthetic, they might use their body or their voice.”
Using such methods is particularly important for Ansonia students, whose standardized testing scores in reading aren’t up to par.
“We’ve taken a look at our reading test scores and we are not where we should be, so we are looking at ways where we can work with the family and the community to provide activities that they can do at home with simple things like a cup and a marker,” Brancato said.
Saturday’s fair also featured six activity stations, each based on a different Dr. Seuss book.
Readiness Council volunteers showed how parents can create a game with everyday objects to reinforce skills taught at school.
Seven-year-old Natalia, a first-grader at John C. Mead School and Readiness Program graduate, won a bookmark, stickers and erasers for completing a word matching game based on the book “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.”
Each child left with a bag of goodies and free books, thanks to a $2,000 Target education/literacy grant.