Beverly Keeps Reading is a community-wide initiative to encourage both children and adults in the city of Beverly to reach for a collective reading goal of reading 5,000 books. It is a collaboration between the Beverly Public Library and the Beverly Public Schools. The messaging is being disseminated entirely electronically: email, websites, and social media.
When our schools closed down, the remote learning website was launched with the name Beverly Keeps Learning. I used that as a jumping off point to develop Beverly Keeps Reading, and organized this initiative as a way to incentivize readers of all ages by adding a visible goal and prizes, and by making reading an activity to do “alone together” while we are forced to be at home. Readers log their books and can also write reviews using the Beanstack website/app. Because of the current situation, all communications and activities must be able to be done electronically.
The primary goal of this project is to encourage reading as an activity for all ages and to do it in a way that makes our city feel bound together in a common purpose while we are forced to stay home as we fight the pandemic. We made the objective 5000 books in order to make it as easy as possible (measuring books instead of hours), and figuring that young children could rack up a lot of picture books that could add onto the totals. During remote learning students are not doing work for a grade (only for “credit”) and independent reading is an effective way to stem learning loss and for students to explore individual passions. We also wanted to highlight the fact that the public library has many electronic books and audiobooks available and to encourage our students and all in the community to try them out. Finally, we wanted to find a way to help local businesses by purchasing prizes from ones that are currently open and by promoting them online -- and getting them to promote our initiative as well.
This project consists of a number of different pieces that work together: