Celebrate Reading

Program Description

Celebrate Reading continues to engage intermediate through college age readers, their teachers and members of their communities. We work in collaboration with a HWP network of teachers, service-learning programs on several college campuses, state and school librarians, community support organizations like Rotary and the Osher Life-Long Learning Institute, and book clubs throughout the islands. It is officially co-sponsored by the Hawai'i Council of Teachers of English, and regularly supported by the Pacific Campus Compact, Diversity and Equity Initiative Grant, the UHM Campus Center Board, and the Hawaii Literary Arts Council. (The program is grateful for its long history of support from the Hawaii Council for the Humanities and Learn and Serve America.) 

All readers are welcome to use our annual reading list, which is disseminated to libraries and at conferences, but active readers take part in the program's two stages. They meet in (often mentored) weekly literature circles and select the literature they want from a long list. Teens set the pace, divide the novels into manageable chunks, and engage in dialogue that raises critical literacy and helps them meet state reading and writing standards. Some teachers encourage student-led independent reading groups of 3 to 6 within the curriculum. Others support mixed-age after-school reading clubs and teacher or parent literature circles. Virtual circles can be led by older students and elder readers, and reading partnerships can flourish between classes of different ages and abilities, or different islands. Moanalua High has offered a half-credit for reading 5-6 books over a year and attending the festival,
The culminating festivals celebrate achieved reading by inviting participants onto each island's biggest campus and offering performance readings and conversational break-out sessions. (Read for three for the big Oahu festival held at the Campus Center Ballroom and throughout Kuykendall Hall, and two for the neighbor islands.) Whether sitting alone with a book or involved in family-shared reading or literature circle dialogue, then, Hawaii's young readers move to celebrate writers and themselves in an exciting, interactive and intergenerational festival. DOE students committed to studying at university, East West Center grantees and leaders, college students from several campus--public and private, rural and urban--mature and young readers come together to meet authors and talk about their responses to the work.
Performance poet Kealoha, acting as MC, welcomes many hundreds of happy teen readers, future leaders and writers, and professional educators to the Oahu festival. Maui holds a small annual festival in the Learning Center at MCC. Kaua'I and Hawaii alternate their biennial Celebrate Reading Festivals. In 2008 Lana'i and Moloka'i are holding their own festivals at their respective high schools, and Windward Community College hosted the first Windward Literature Festival.

Download Current Celebrating Reading highlights and schedules at the top of this page.

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