Annual Elementary School Lit Fest Showcases Literacy Skills

The annual Mount Nittany Elementary School Lit Fest was held March 22, 2023. The event is led by librarian Dustin Brackbill and the goal was to show the school the wide and wonderful variety of literacy skills needed across our diverse community and to encourage reading, writing, listening, and storytelling. Books, read, reading, library, MNE, literature, literacy

During Mount Nittany Elementary School’s Lit Fest 2023 on March 22, children’s book illustrator Eric Velasquez told students about a “book dummy.”

He wasn’t referring to a dim-witted character. As Velasquez explained, it’s a prototype used in publishing to arrange illustrations and text for final books. “You get an idea of what the book is going to look like when it’s finished,” he said.

Velasquez, a Hartsdale, N.Y., resident whose award-winning art has graced more than 30 books, was among the many guests invited to Lit Fest, a school tradition since 2016. At each of Lit Fest’s three 45-minute sessions, Mount Nittany students could choose a talk or activity from a wide range of selections. One session helped students generate empowering words, another figurative language. Other rooms were devoted to illustrating, using dramatic arts for storytelling, exploring bilingual books in Spanish and English, crafting personal proclamations, screenwriting, publishing, coding, and reading weather maps for meteorology, to name a few of the choices.

In one room, employees from a local culinary classes program showed students how to follow a recipe while making soba noodle salad. After each received a portion to take home, they listened to a reading of “The Way We Do It In Japan” by Geneva Cobb Ilijima, the story of a boy adjusting to Japanese culture.

It was just one of many stories read aloud throughout the day.

“Our goal was to show the school the wide and wonderful variety of literacy skills needed across our diverse community,” MNE librarian Dustin Brackbill, Lit Fest’s founder, said. “We hope that this day has been a step into that larger world of encouraging reading, writing, listening, and storytelling.”