College of Education assists local schools with Children's Choices project

For the second year, teachers in the College of Education are helping some lucky elementary school students add to their school’s libraries. Through the Children’s Choices project, funded through the International Reading Association and the Children’s Book Council, students at five local schools will be sampling the best of new children’s books and giving their valuable opinions on what’s cool and what’s, well, not so cool. An added bonus of the program is that the schools get to keep the books that the children judge.

The schools that the department is working with this year, North Harlem Elementary, McBean Elementary, Willis-Foreman Elementary, Lewiston Elementary, and St. Mary on the Hill Catholic School, are professional development schools, in which College of Education students often work.

“That’s one of the provisions that I made,” said Beth Pendergraft, assistant professor of teacher development. “We wanted the schools to be ones that our students worked in.” This is the second of a three-year commitment to the program, Ms. Pendergraft said. Augusta State is one of five schools selected nationally to participate in the program, which was formed in 1974 to help develop an annual annotated reading list of new books that will encourage young people to read. The program also aims to help teachers, librarians, booksellers, and others find books that young readers will enjoy, and to provide young readers with an opportunity to voice their opinions about the books being written for them.

Each year an average of 100 favorite books are chosen by approximately 10,000 children ages 5 to 13 from different regions of the country. The annotated list of the children’s favorites is printed in the October issue of the International Reading Association’s The Reading Teacher.

Participating in the program is a big commitment, Ms. Pendergraft said, one that couldn’t be undertaken if not for the help of other faculty and staff in the College of Education. Books begin arriving in late summer and had to be sorted and delivered to schools.

“It really is an honor to be chosen for the program,” she said. “But getting it done is a joint effort here.”

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