Attendees of the Malden Reads Pizza Night at the Dockside Restaurant in Malden. Photo taken by Julie Yu.
Malden Reads hosted a “Pizza for Patina Readers” event at Dockside, on April 20th 2018. Patina is a book by a New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds. The children’s book is about a girl who is a new member of the track team and describes her journey of learning to relay in track while facing obstacles in her own personal life. Patina mainly targets kids age 10 and older, but the event brought together people of all ages, including toddlers and parents who have read the book.
Malden Reads chose Patina as a companion book to go along with The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, which is why this event was mostly based off of that specific book. Organizer of this event, Tara Murphy Beardsley stated that Malden Reads believes “that it is important to expose students to different viewpoints”. She went further to explain that there are not enough books that represent struggles that the diverse Malden community may be facing.
When first entering the room, there was a sign up for a raffle going on during the event on the front table. The raffle prizes included a hard copy of Patina and track equipment, as the main character Patina was on a track team.
Alongside the raffle, they also provided guests with diabetes information. Beardsley explained that the mother in the book had diabetes and lost her legs which is the main reason why they provided kids and even adults the basic information on diabetes.
At the event, they had a station set up with construction paper and other arts and craft supplies to make and decorate bookmarks. On the bookmarks, many kids attached pictures of themselves that they took on the Polaroid cameras. After making bookmarks, the kids went around the “carousel”, answering questions around the room. The questions referred and related back to events that played a significant role in the storyline. Examples of some questions were, “what’s your nickname?”, or “what do you do when you’re angry?”.
When the kids finished making a bookmark and answering the questions around the room, there was an activity where they got to frost cupcakes. The activity was inspired by the tradition Patina had in the book. Patina would make pretend cupcakes, and the activity was brought to life. Everyone got two mini cupcakes, frosting and sprinkles. Many kids ended up devouring their cupcakes the second they finished decorated.
All the kids then went outside and did an activity, where they would do the baton handoff just like Patina when she joined the track team. Due to the fact that the activity was performed on the back deck of Dockside, they had to improvise because of the limited space. The kids all formed in one line. The second person in line would have the baton first and ran to pass it to the first person. Once the first person in line received the baton, they would run forward to touch the railing and the whole line would move up. As the line moves, the first person would then pass it to the second current person in line, and the cycle repeats.
Malden Reads continues to host events. More information can be found at http://maldenreads.org.
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