March is National Reading Month and St. Louis High School celebrated it with tons of activities, put on mostly by English teachers Mrs. Kaiser and Ms. Reeves.
The activities started out with trivia and guessing the teacher’s favorite books. There was a board located in the freshman/sophomore hallway that had a matching game for students to guess what books listed were each teacher’s favorite. Along with this, there were daily book trivia to earn tickets for a book basket raffle.
Mrs. Kaiser said, “I did not get to do all that I would like to have done. The ones we did were daily trivia questions that related to books or reading, a matching worksheet where students could try to guess staff members’ favorite books, students could make bookmarks, and a guess at the book title worksheet. All of these things led to students earning raffle tickets which could be entered to win book basket prizes.”
March hasn’t been the only fun month for SLHS students, who enjoyed a race to win the most spirit points back in February. Yet what sparked this initiative to increase student engagement? Mrs. Kaiser said, “The last few years, Mrs. Reeves and myself have talked about doing activities for March, but usually we start talking about it after the month has already passed. It is such a busy time of year, so by then it is usually too late to plan. This year because we had planned activities for February, I also started gathering ideas for March at the same time. This year it seems like we are losing a lot of students to virtual, and it is sad to see. Mrs. Reeves and I have been asking ourselves why don’t students want to be here? So it seemed more important this year than ever before to do these activities to try to make school a little bit more fun to bring joy to students, even if it is just in small ways.”
Students have definitely felt more engaged in the school during March. In fact, Senior Olivia Good said, “I truly have loved the March is reading month activities. I think the daily trivia and really challenges the brain. I definitely think that this month and these activities have pushed students to show up to school, because we all know March is really close to the end but not close enough, so these activities have helped people to come and have fun. I hope the months leading up to the end of school will be just as fun!”
The March activities come to an end Friday March 22, when the winners of the book baskets will be announced before students go off on spring break.
