We recently ended our academic year of programming here at Freedom Readers!  One of the unique aspects of our program is that our scholars learn about the world through themes.  Themes bring context to the world that we live in and introduce our scholars to new vocabulary and ideas.  In Fall 2023, our theme was Oceans, in Spring 2024 we introduced Inventors and Inventions, and for Summer 2024 our scholars learned about the Olympics.

Let’s take you inside our long-standing site at Chesterfield Baptist Church! At the end of the fall session, Proud Day was a wonderful celebration of oceanography, conservation, and confidence. Here, you can view a compilation of the Proud Day speeches:

For summer, Chesterfield brought in a new initiative of Freedom Readers known as Book Club to be a part of their summer camp.  The program became a great learning experience for scholars to grow and improve their reading skills through literature circles and discussion of the texts that small groups read together.   The summer camp was also open to older scholars, and we were able to see that Book Club could be effective for all ages.  Scholars Ebony (11th grade) and Khimya (9th grade) attended Freedom Readers for the summer and they loved it.  Their tutor, Korina said, “It’s good that they have something like this.”

“I like to read so I finish books in a day,” said Khimya. In their group setting they read a novel called Loser by Jerry Spinelli. “I think the most challenging part is keeping them together sometimes, but I love my group. We have really good discussions,” Korina said.

Now, we’re looking forward to our fall session.  Scholar registration will open soon and we will be featuring a theme of Civics: Rock the Vote!  We plan to teach our scholars about civic engagement, being a good citizen, and what it means to vote.  If you’d like to help our scholars learn more about this theme, we encourage you to contribute to us by donating books from our Amazon Wishlist!