What a Wonderful world of Books!

Park Library is seeking up to $4,000 plus cost reimbursement to purchase an additional 60 titles of Wonderbooks and Playaways to enhance the small audiobook collection newly added to our library this year.

Wonderbooks are hardcover books with a small audiobook player built into the front cover, allowing students to listen to a narrator while they read along and comprehend the printed text. The devices include play, pause, rewind and fast-forward buttons and a headphone jack for readers to use. Playaways are an audiobook in a small portable cartridge that work similarly to Wonderbooks, but lack the speaker, requiring readers to provide headphones in order to listen to the story.

Park Middle School is a Title I school with over 800 students. The new addition of 150 Wonderbooks and Playaways have been extremely popular and have encouraged even the most reluctant readers to check out and read books from our school library. Many students have enjoyed listening and reading along with these titles. However, due to the limited selection, we frequently run out these type of titles. These types of books have been particularly helpful to our English Learners, which make up about eight percent of our total population, and our Life Skills students. According to Joy Harvery, a Lincoln Public Schools Library Coordinator, “From a literacy standpoint, these books can help every student learn to read more fluently. Kids are going to be able to comprehend material using both the print and audio tools, and their vocabulary and background knowledge will increase too. It’s pretty empowering.”

While our library would like to add to the small collection, the average cost range of $50-100 per item is too expensive for our annual budget to afford. With the $4,000, we will be able to add up to 60 new high-interest accessible titles to this new collection. Thank you for considering donating to our students!