An important component of CLiF’s flagship Year of the Book program is the Momentum grant, a follow-up year of support designed to help schools sustain enthusiasm around reading and writing once their Year of the Book programming concludes. Momentum provides $1,000 toward activities such as family literacy events, author visits, new books, and other opportunities that bolster a schoolwide culture of literacy. These funds are intended to assist schools in considering smaller, low-cost ways to keep inspiring their students, staff, and families around literacy and learning. 

This year’s Momentum cohort includes Albany Community School, a rural school in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom that received the Year of the Book grant in 2023-2024. Grant coordinator and school librarian Kristin Urie used Momentum funds to invite local artist, filmmaker, editor, and animator Meredith Holch to the school to make “crankies” with the students. These centuries-old visual storytelling devices use a scroll and a crank to tell a story, often accompanied by live music. 

Since the school continues to work toward boosting reading proficiency, as well as building on the excitement generated by their Year of the Book grant, they focused on crankies as a way to engage students creatively around storytelling. The CLiF grant funds paid for Meredith to spend three days at the school with grades 2-6, teaching students about crankie storytelling and how to make a crankie. Students made a collaborative crankie story in small groups and then performed for all grades.

Increasing community and family engagement is an ongoing goal for the school, and this project helped further those connections. Students displayed their finished work for the community at the Crankie Storyhouse located in the Genny Albany – the town’s general store in the heart of the village; also a great place for a hot breakfast sandwich if you’re ever passing through!

Here’s some reflections from Kristin in her own words:

Q. How did students make their crankies?

Students worked in pairs to create a story using a “mad lib” format that Meredith provided, and groups read the stories to each other. Next, they created their crankie box, with younger children using a tissue box and chopsticks, and older kids using shoeboxes and building their own cranks. After this they worked on the crankie roll itself, making illustrations on a super-long roll of paper to accompany their spoken story. 

Q. How did this program support literacy?

Imagining a story, writing the words, reading the stories aloud several times, creating illustrations to show the meaning of the written words, and then for the audience to hear the story and see the images and understand the meaning – this project supported literacy in SO many ways!

Q. How did students respond?

Overall they loved it, both the crankie creators and the audience. The variety of work provided multiple opportunities for students to engage; for example, a student who was resistant to the writing could dive in and focus with the crankie creation. The second grade class is planning a collaborative project with a middle school class after break that will use crankies to tell a story. There is a strong interest to keep the crankie learning going!

This project is the perfect example of literacy instruction that engages students in an innovative way. They wrote, drew, constructed, and performed their stories–how cool is that? It’s a wonderful way to implement literacy instruction while also having fun, which is what CLiF is all about. I love seeing how Momentum schools can use this money to benefit their students in so many different ways, and always with a keen attention to the needs of their own unique school community. In the end, it’s what works for them and CLiF provides the means to make it happen.