Children’s author Salina Yoon joined TLC students to kick off the school’s monthly reading program PARP, which stands for Pick a Reading Partner. Ms. Yoon is a well-known, numerous award-winning author and illustrator of over 180 children’s books.
PARP encourages children to read at home for at least 15 minutes each night with any partner they’d like. Students then mark their PARP calendar each night they read and return it at the end of the month. There’s a game board with incentives on it and each grade level that has at least 75% participation in PARP gets to roll one die to move their grade level game piece. There are also individual class incentives that are given to each class that has at least 95% participation.
Ms. Yoon told the students about herself and how she moved to the United States from Korea when she was four years old and how English was hard for her at first. She said that’s how she chose some of her characters for her stories, to show how she got along with children until the language pieces fell into place for her. Ms. Yoon read her book “Stormy Night” and had children participate in reading the pictures by acting out the sound of rain every time they saw it. Two students also came up and held sheets to wave to make the sound of wind. She also read her story “Be a Friend” about a boy who mimes, so she had two students come up to act out the parts of the children in the story while she read it. Ms. Yoon also showed students how she draws two of her most well-known characters, Bear and Penguin.