Pillow Elementary School collected more than 8,000 books with the help of staff and community to be redistributed to students for summer reading.

A group of teachers at Pillow set a goal of collecting at least 10 books per student for the 565 students signed up for the school’s summer reading program, making their goal to raise 6,000 books.

With the help of neighborhood listserves, school flyers, a walking field trip and emails, more than 8,000 books were donated and distributed to students.

The books came from a variety of sources, including:

• 3,000 new books from Pro Ed;
• hundreds of books from a local church;
• more than 500 books from one student’s mother;
• classroom collections from two retiring teachers;
• eight tubs of books, many in Spanish, from the language arts supervisor; and
• monetary donations for books from FirstBooks, a Scholastic book clearance sale, Recycle Reads and other businesses.

In addition to distributing books to students the last week of school, a website was created for the Wild About Reading Project, warppillow.weebly.com. Also created were posters and a training video for parents—called For the Love of Reading—that promotes literacy.

On July 26 students and parents are invited to meet and discuss their favorite books at the North Village Library Branch, 2505 Steck Ave. In the fall, students who read over the summer will write book reviews to share.