USN community reads together January 11-17

By Kate Pritchard, Library Director

You may have heard of Read Across America Day, celebrated every year on Dr. Seuss’ birthday. At USN, we’ve turned that idea into a whole week dedicated to reading in all its forms. We invite our whole community — students, families, faculty & staff — to celebrate Read Across USN Week from Monday, January 13 through Friday, January 17 and reach for a goal of collectively reading 250,000 pages. 

On Friday, January 10, we will send home tracking sheets with students so they can begin recording the number of pages they read each day from Saturday, January 11 to Friday, January 17. There will also be a form on the library website for participants to submit their page count online if they prefer. All students and their families, as well as all faculty & staff, are invited to join the challenge. We will collect the tracking sheets on Tuesday, January 21 and announce the final tally on Friday, January 24.

Participation is entirely voluntary, but we hope many of you will join us. Reading is an important part of our lives and comes in all different forms, whether you’re listening to an audiobook while taking a walk, reading a picture book to a child, browsing a magazine on your iPad, rereading a beloved Calvin & Hobbes collection, or even reading sheet music. It all counts! And everyone who turns in a tracking sheet not only adds their number to our total tally, but also gets entered into a raffle for a bookish prize.

To really get us excited about this challenge, we’re hosting a Community Night in the library from 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. Thursday, January 16 featuring refreshments and fun activities like a Hassenfeld Library scavenger hunt and an opportunity to create your own custom READ posters — plus, of course, plenty of books to help keep you turning pages. We’d love to have a few parent volunteers to help with this event; if you’re interested, here is the USNA sign-up sheet. We hope to see you there!