Ready, Set, School! Club Wraps Up Part 1 — Here's How Newton County Families Celebrated
This weekend, Newton Community Partnership's Ready, Set, School! Club closed out its first five-week session — and what a way to finish. For Week 5, families gathered for two very different kinds of stories: Ready, Set, Skip!, an active, get-up-and-move book, and Goodnight Gorilla, a nearly wordless picture book that let kids narrate the story in their own words. It was the perfect pairing to send Part 1 off — one book to get the wiggles out, one to spark imagination. Kids wrapped up the morning making their own paper bag puppets to take home.
By the numbers:
5 weeks of free Saturday programming
10 books read together as a group
5 take-home books per child
At least one hands-on craft every single week
New friendships made along the way
Because it was the last session, every child who completed the program went home with a Ready, Set, School! Club completion bag — packed with a dry-erase learning board and marker, markers, colored pencils, crayons, a paint pad, watercolor paints, Ticonderoga pencils, sidewalk chalk, Play-Doh, and even a container of salt for at-home rainbow salt tray activities, plus more activity ideas from each week's lesson to keep the learning going at home. We also want to say a huge thank you to the community partners who made this celebration possible: Stevi B's Pizza in Covington, who provided a free Kid's Buffet voucher for every child, and the Children's Museum of Atlanta, who provided free admission for all of our young readers. And of course, none of this happens without people. Thank you to Macaroni KID Stonecrest-Conyers-Covington for helping plan and facilitate the program, to our Hands on Newton adult volunteers who showed up for every session, and to our Newton County Youth Action Team members who came out to help week after week. Lastly a big thank you to Amazon and ChangeX who helped make this possible by funding the program.
What's next? We're already working on updating and expanding the program into more parts — so if your family finished Part 1 this summer, keep an eye out for Part 2. And if you missed this session but want to be part of the next one, we have an interest list open now.
Here's to more books, more friends, and more Saturdays spent building a love of reading in Newton County.