Read Your Heart Out

Students at Green Bay’s Howe Elementary welcomed community members and special guests into their classrooms last Friday, Jan. 31, for the fifth annual Read Your Heart Out event.

The event featured a presentation by local author Baptiste Paul followed by guest readers in each classroom.

“It’s a great kickoff for Black History Month,” Howe Elementary Principal Amy Kallioinen said. “And we’re really focused on finding the love and joy of reading and finding a bunch of different people from the community that mirror our students and that our students can see themselves in.”

It’s an idea that hits home for the guest readers, too, who didn’t experience that type of representation when they were in school.

“Representation matters,” said Ivy McGee, director of resource development at NeighborWorks Green Bay and guest reader for Ms. Knott’s fourth grade class.

“I think it’s really important for students to be able to see different types of people in their classroom. I grew up in Green Bay. My school was West De Pere and I didn’t have anybody that looked like me. I want to make sure that students, especially brown and black students, see folks in their space, in their classroom, that reflect somebody they might know or might look like themselves.”

Bringing community members into the classroom also helps expose students to more of the opportunities that are available to them.

“It helps continue to grow the love of reading for students, but it also helps build a sense of pride and expand their mind to the possibility that there are other people that look like them that are right in our community and that do amazing things,” Kallioinen said. “It opens that window of what they’re able to do.”

But the students aren’t the only ones to benefit from the Read Your Heart Out event.

“I’m biased, but I think we have some of the best kids in this community and [guest readers] get to see not only the kids and their work, but they also get to experience the amazing educators that get to work with our kids every day,” Kallioinen said.

“Just being around young people and curious minds and questioning minds and just really connecting with young people, it’s wonderful,” McGee said. “Intergenerational friendships are so important and to be able to connect with kiddos that I typically wouldn’t be able to work with or talk to on a daily basis has been really cool.”

McGee said she hopes students remember Read Your Heart later in life and can reflect on the positive impact it had on them.

“I hope that the students take something from the experience and have a fond memory that, when they’re my age, they can look back and say, ‘I remember we had this really incredible program called Read Your Heart Out where people from the community spent time with us and talked to us about history and books and reading and writing,’” McGee said. “My hope is that in 15-20 years, they’ll look back and say, ‘That was a really cool thing that I was a part of.’”

As a more concrete reminder of the Read Your Heart Out event and the representation and joy of reading it encourages, a mural was added to one of Howe’s stairwells, painted by Stevens Point-based artist Kiba Freeman.

“The mural is based on the idea of reading your heart out, ideas coming to life and using imagination both when reading and after reading,” ARTIST said. “A lot of things in the mural are things that we talked about or things that are incorporated into the Read Your Heart Out event. Many of the books [students] have read or been introduced to. It’s the idea that magical things happen when you read. The mural depicts different things coming out of books’ pages, flying around with things written on them or things not written on them because those stories haven’t been written yet.”

As with the other Read Your Heart Out festivities, Freeman’s mural is intended to both foster a love of reading and show students that there are people who look like them doing things they may not have considered pursuing before.

“One of the main reasons I do public art is so my daughter can see herself in public art…” Freeman said. “And then also, there are a lot of kids that’ll be like, ‘Oh, this guy is an artist. That’s his job. That’s his profession.’ It’s something that they may aspire to do… That’s the cool thing about this whole event — it introduces kids to a lot of different things that are possibilities that they probably knew about but didn’t really see themselves in. It’s pretty cool. I love being able to connect with young folks and helping them to see that creativity doesn’t have to stop — you can keep being as creative as you want.”