July is here and enough teachers have committed to being Zoom hosts for our reading clubs on July 11th! We have very few spots, though, so they filled up quickly.

If you have ever read with us at any of our prior reading clubs, please visit our home page at www.readingtokids.org to see if there any new openings for you to submit your RSVP for our third-ever Reading to Kids Virtual Reading Clubs on Saturday, July 11th.

(If you are signed up but can't attend after all, please click here to cancel so someone else can take your place!)

If you check the website and find it is full, please keep checking back, since additional spots may open up over the next week.

We are again limiting RSVPs for these experimental virtual reading clubs only to returning volunteers - people who have volunteered with us at least once before at any of our previous reading clubs.

HOW VIRTUAL READING CLUBS WORK

Because LAUSD teachers are using Zoom to reach their students, we will use Zoom for these virtual reading clubs. The reading clubs will be hosted by participating teachers at each school using their school Zoom accounts, but you will need your own Zoom account to join the reading club. If you don’t already have a Zoom account, you can sign up for a free, Basic account here: https://zoom.us/pricing

IMPORTANT: You will need to use Zoom from a desktop or laptop computer. The phone and tablet versions of Zoom do not have the necessary features for our virtual reading clubs.

Ideally, anyone who volunteers for these virtual reading clubs will be comfortable using Zoom. If you wish to test out your Zoom connectivity prior to the reading clubs, we encourage you to email us at info@readingtokids.org so we may do a brief test run with you before the virtual reading clubs.

The Friday before the reading clubs you will receive a link for a Zoom "check-in" session with your Site Coordinators that will begin promptly at 9:00 a.m. that Saturday. Click here to review the schedule for these virtual reading clubs.

Once you and your fellow volunteers are checked in, that same Zoom session will have a Zoom Volunteer Orientation / Virtual Reading Club Training that will start promptly at 9:15 a.m.

At 9:30 a.m. you and your volunteer partner will leave that Site Coordinator session and then join the teacher's Zoom session. The teacher will host the Zoom call and make you co-hosts. The first 30 minutes will be for troubleshooting and a prep session for just you and your reading partner and the teacher.

The kids will join that same reading club Zoom session at 10:00 a.m., and it will likely go until 10:30 or 11:00, at the teacher's discretion.

After the reading clubs end you will then rejoin your Site Coordinator's Zoom call for a brief wrap-up.

To screen share the book you will be reading with the children, you will need Adobe Acrobat or the free Adobe Reader from https://get.adobe.com/reader.

We will provide you a PDF of the read-aloud book so you can prepare for the reading clubs. You can see the read-aloud book titles for this month at https://readingtokids.org/Books/BooksMonth.php.

We will provide at the above link activities and simple craft ideas the kids can do at home. You would prepare to lead the kids in an activity and craft, though you may not actually do a craft, depending upon how the Zoom session goes. The kids may just want to talk to new faces!

Please join us in thanking Anthony Reyes for his past 10 months of dedicated service to Reading to Kids!

This past Tuesday was Anthony's last day of his Public Allies AmeriCorps Apprentice service with us, and we could not have had such a successful transition to virtual reading clubs without him! Fortunately for us, he plans to keep volunteering with us at the reading clubs when he can.

Anthony, we at Reading to Kids will miss working with you both in person and at a distance each day, and we wish you the very best as you work with your next organization through AmeriCorps!