March Book Madness at CFSN!
By: Tina Perkins, Community Literacy Program Manager
National Reading Month started as a celebration in March to honor Dr. Suess’s birthday. Here at Center For Success Network we dubbed this special month of learning literacy, March Book Madness!
March Book Madness comes from a cross between “March Reading Month” and “March Madness”. March Madness refers to the college basketball tournament. The competition takes place every March and the madness it creates is excitement! Experts choose the teams to play in the tournament each year. When a team loses a game, it leaves the tournament. The tournament dwindles down to the last two rounds referred to as the Sweet Sixteen, the Final Four, and in the end, one team reigns supreme collegiate basketball team.
Center for Success Network wants to support our community of caregivers, team members, and volunteer mentors to feel inspired to motivate our students to read more and join in the fun picking their very own bracket of books to reveal the final winning book. Our March Book Madness throughout the month of March creates a very exciting and nail-biting competition to the Final Four and finally the last book standing to be crowned the winning book of March Book Madness!
March Book Madness is an important opportunity to inspire students to pick their favorite book in the tournament and watch to see if it will be eliminated from the brackets or move up to the final four. At the end of March Book Madness, we celebrate and reveal the winning book at our annual event featuring local authors, raffles for prizes, awards for students who have the highest reading minutes for the month featuring one winner from each of our sites, and announce the grand prize winner with the winning bracket!
Why do we celebrate March Book Madness? Reading every day enriches all of our lives and increases our chances of future opportunities in adulthood. In children, belly to ten years old; studies show that it supports cognitive development, improves language acquisition, prepares students for continued academic success, improves creativity and aids in higher concentration and develops self-awareness and self-discipline, empathy for others, and fosters a love of books full of diverse characters and communities.