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Show School District Joins Hands With Parents to Help Children by Dr. Daryl J. McCarty Educators, parents, children and merchants have joined hands in the North Sanpete School District to work toward a splendid pair of objectives. rirst, they want to heighten youngsters' interest in reading. Second, they're working work-ing for more family closeness. It's a contest. Parents and children receive points for accomplishing ac-complishing various parts of the program. Among the activities outlined are such things as evening family fami-ly "reading hours." A particularly audacious part of the contest is the suggestion sugges-tion that families "try one week without any TV at all," and that family members get all their information from reading that week. Among the responsibilities respon-sibilities outlined for families -are such activities ac-tivities as going together to the library to apply for cards; read-a-thons with family members persuing books for a half hour each night; and listening listen-ing to the young student stu-dent reading aloud. Parents have heavy commitments to the program. They are asked ask-ed to assign topics to their children for encyclopedia en-cyclopedia research and tell bedtime stories. Dad is asked to build a book shelf for a child's bedroom. Mom or Dad is asked to visit the youngster's school classroom. The kids themselves face such tasks as look up ten words in the dictionary, dic-tionary, playing reading games with parents, reading the comics with other family fami-ly members, and checking check-ing a book out of the school library and reading it. Teacher Larry Seeley said the home-and-school reading campaign cam-paign is a contest, and that the families scoring scor-ing the most points will receive prizes from merchants. mer-chants. The prizes, though, are secondary, he said. "Whats most important impor-tant is drawing families closer together and motivating young people peo-ple to read," he said. |