How do you like Scholastic? I've been doing the book fair for years, and my consultant this year is seriously horrible. Lazy customer service, etc. Past years have been great, though.

We are planning our first Family Reading Night for March 4th, which is during our Scholastic Book Fair. I will be sending out a newsletter and flyers to all parents telling them about the Family Night in February.

We are fortunate to have many authors in our state and we invited one, whose books we own, to come and make a presentation to our preschool families. We will offer his books for presale so that he can personalize and sign the books in advance.

If you cannot get a local author (some charge quite a bit), ask local officials, like the Mayor, State/Town Representative, Children's Librarian or even the local bookstore.

We are trying to make it as simple as possible for the first year. We cannot hold raffles in our school, but we purchased pre-made bookmarks, stickers, etc. as small giveaways when they buy a book from the fair. Positive Promotions has many options and gives you ideas on what you can do, but I found Dr. Suess themed items at Oriental Trading Co. less expensive.

We will have refreshments, like juice, water, coffee, popcorn, fruit and some baked goods.

We are very excited for this event and hope it proves to be a success. Please feel free to email me it you have any questions at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Good luck!

Elisa

We are getting ready to plan a reading night, but we have close to 800 kids... I know not all of them will come, but even if half come with siblings... wow! We have a gym, cafeteria, library, halls... Do we ask everyone to come in their pjs & bring pillows so we can all hang out & read? We have ordered the kit from PTOtoday, but while waiting for it to come in we'd like to start planning something.

March is National Reading Month and it's a great month to promote a Family Reading Night! We find that coming up with a catchy theme and promoting it conjunction with reading month we get more families to participate. We start sending out flyers and putting up posters in February so they can plan ahead.

Where should I set up my reading night? How do I go about asking celebrities to read? Should I combine reading night with our book fair.... These are just a sampling of the types of planning, promotions & logistic questions to ask or answer on this thread. If you have already run a Family Reading Night , we'd love to hear what worked for you. If you're thinking or running this night and have questions, fire away!

~Lisa

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