emma4reading-blog

[emma4reading-blog]

Sprint 4

I’ve spent the past sprint developing an archive of images that satisfy Read to Them’s guidelines (the kids and parents are engaged in the books, the titles are either not obvious or they mesh well with Read to Them’s titles, at least two or more people reading) and can be incorporated into graphic, social media content. All the images I found are public domain and free to use and modify. 

Additionally, I’m working on the layout for a series of daily activities that can be posted throughout Read Aloud to a Child Week. During this process I’ve been taking our working brand guidelines into consideration and using typefaces agreed upon by our team. Having social media posts that directly engage with the target audience by providing fun activities for kids and their families that go along with the theme is a good way to get people to interact with the Read Aloud to a Child Week social media.

Moving forward, we need to continue working with the content we’ve collected and develop some posts: some for the months ahead of the week and some for the week itself. We also need to put the final touches on the brand guidelines and decide on how we should approach color, additional graphic imagery in our social media content (shapes, etc.) I’m going to talk to Emily at Read to Them this week, show her what we have and get some feedback.

[emma4reading-blog]

Blog post 3--late

The past few sprints our group has faced some challenges--the deadline of Read Aloud to a Child Week caught us unprepared and still looking for our footing. We spent a significant amount of time developing a logo and setting up a bare-bones social media presence and the calendar initiative, and though these were somewhat successful endeavors, the time would’ve been better spent preparing content and a plan for the week itself. Moving forward, our team is going to work on preparing for next year’s RACW, which I believe will be more fruitful. Though I’ve felt somewhat dissatisfied with our progress, I think we’ve definitely gathered a solid understanding of the week and Read to Them, and the feedback we’ve received from Bruce and Chris will be a huge help in developing content for next year.

The logo we produced allows for a consistent way of introducing content in an engaging, fun way.  We’re working on more versions of this gif and that’ll be an ongoing exploration throughout the rest of the course.  The 11 x 17 friendly-size works well with posters and could easily be a major brand element for the RACW campaign.

Additionally, I’m working on a secondary logo that Bruce wanted to consider. He was interested in incorporating an [abstracted] image of a parent reading to a child sitting on their shoulders. I developed some prototype-sketches.

I showed these prototypes to Bruce and Emily (RTT’s lead graphic designer) and continued to work on them in Illustrator.

I’m going to continue working on this, though this is endeavor isn’t a huge priority, as the main focus right now is developing content and we do have a working logo. 

As for content, I’m in the process of finding imagery online that satisfies Bruce and Chris’ ideal content and takes into account how engaged the child and/or parent in the image is as well as what book they’re reading. This is the most difficult part of producing content for the week, though once I find (and create) a number of images that can be used for next year, producing compositions that can be shared on social media or on posters won’t be too challenging.

[emma4reading-blog]

“Discovery Summary”

BLOG POST No. 1

Read Aloud to a Child Week (RACW) is an important event with a simple message: kids aren’t read to enough and that’s a problem with pretty significant consequences. The organization we’ve been paired with in this class-- Read to Them-- has done extensive work with schools and educators to influence the culture of literacy within children’s homes, but ultimately it’s in the hands of parents, guardians, and family members to step up and get kids into reading. Upon first approaching this issue of boosting the awareness and success of RACW, our team workshopped the following problem statement, which serves to keep us focused on why this issue is an important one: “Kids need to be excited to read and learn in order to set them up for better performance in life”. Numerous studies have confirmed this to be true, as have our preliminary surveys of young people: reading to kids when they’re young is a game-changer in preparing them for a bright and successful future.

There are countless people directly involved with and/or impacted by kids’ literacy and relationship with reading. Parents, busy with providing a home, clothes, sustenance, and security for their family, place the burden of their child’s education entirely on the schools and teachers. Whether this is because they are unaware of the benefits of being engaged in their child’s education or because they’re far too busy providing their child with basic necessities, it has a huge impact on a child’s quality of life. A parent who spends even the tiniest amount of time helping their kid with homework or reading to them is giving them a precious gift: a love and respect for reading that will hang with them for years and enhance their education tenfold. Teachers, many of whom give their work 110% and are personally invested in bettering their pupils, are overworked carrying the load of hundreds of kids entire educations. Kids being engaged in schoolwork and influenced by a home life that rewards and assists academic achievement makes a teacher’s job more effective and rewarding. Kids, of course, are the ones who are most impacted by being read to. Reading to kids has an immense impact on their academic performance, empowering them, allowing them to develop an eagerness for learning new things, and assists them in getting a handle on basic language and comprehension skills. By engaging with their parents in a creative, academic way, a child comes to understand that their parents are invested and involved in their education. 

The outcomes of a successful RACW are as follows: increased brand interaction with Read to Them, improvements in academic performance, increased family interaction, and increased reading habits among children. The primary outcome of our work will be more kids reading with their loved ones, though this is one we are still working out ways of quantifying. 

My first research goal was to survey college students and see whether they remembered being read to and what kind of impact they felt it had on their current circumstances. I got a huge number of responses and they all supported the assumptions we had made thus far: college students who were read to as children look back on it fondly and overwhelmingly named it as the biggest influence in their interest in reading today. Some responses also pointed to their experiences reading with their parents as an essential bonding moment and others said it was a huge influence on their current creative and professional endeavors. Those few surveyed who did not have experiences being read to don’t like to read and wish they had been read to. My secondary goal was to uncover which social media outlets parents use the most/are the most active on. I found an extensive number of statistics, all of which pointed to Facebook as the primary social media outlet we should focus on. My research will also inform how we approach parents, as moms and dads interact with social media in different ways, as well as how we could approach siblings and other age groups.

So far, this project has affirmed what I’ve always felt to be true: reading is one of the most important things a child (or adult) can be passionate about.