• Pleasant Gap teacher gets dozens of book donations to improve class library

    blBooks donated to Pam Grimminger’s fourth-grade class at Pleasant Gap Elementary School are being used to promote literacy and other topics the books focus on.

    Grimminger received about 80 books since the start of school after she created an Amazon wish list looking for donations to help enhance her classroom library. It was an idea inspired by a similar project fellow Pleasant Gap Elementary teacher Trevor Montgomery did, which also got a positive response.

    “It’s a way bigger number than I was expecting,” Grimminger said.

    She now regularly introduces new books to the class. Her students are then allowed to read them during reading time and check out them to bring home. When asked if they like the donated books, the students all enthusiastically and simultaneously said, “yes!”

    “It’s really cool when we get new books delivered,” student Emma Kopcha said.

    She likes reading the “A to Z Mysteries” series, and is hoping to start with the “I Survived” series by Lauren Tarshis, as well. Her next goal, she said, is to check off a list of every place she’s read including in a pile of leaves. The more locations students read at, the more tickets they get to turn in for a prize drawing.

    On Oct. 3, Grimminger introduced seven new books to her class that were donated by the Narber family of Spring Mills. They included children biographies about Neil Armstrong, Walt Disney, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Anne Frank, Henry Ford and the Wright brothers.

    Grimminger said many of the books she’s received are focused on nonfiction work. She also hopes to keep adding to the list to help build the classroom library.

    *By Brit Milazzo, public relations director, BASD