 |
| Children select books from the Beech Tree Community Summer Library. |
Once a week during the summer, teachers from Beech Tree Elementary School will bring a “traveling library” to children at the Willston Center in Seven Corners and the James Lee Community Center and the Summer School-Age Childcare (SACC) program at Westlawn Elementary School in Falls Church.
Many of these children don’t have a lot of books in their home and don’t have a chance to visit libraries often, said Marnie Garnier, a reading teacher at Beech Tree who started the Community Summer Library program four years ago. “We want to keep them reading in the summer so they don’t lose the academic gains they made during the year,” she said.
The program starts July 2 and will run through Aug. 13. Every Tuesday, Garnier and other teachers who volunteer with the program will bring about 15 to 20 boxes of donated books to the three sites. This is the first year that the Westlawn Summer SACC program will be included; Beech Tree has a SACC program during the school year, but not in the summer.
The traveling library will be at the Willston Center, 9:30-10:15 a.m.; Westlawn, 10:30-11 a.m.; and James Lee, 11:15 a.m.-noon. Garnier’s ultimate goal is to get funding for a bookmobile to bring books into children’s neighborhoods.
If you’d like to donate children’s books to the program, contact Marnie Garnier at mcgarnier@fcps.edu.