Good news! Canterbury student's reading program comes to Guadalupe Center

Canterbury student’s PageTurner initiative begins at Guadalupe Center

Fort Myers-based BelieveNBooks has launched a new initiative, PageTurner, to help preschool-aged children become better readers at an early age.

PageTurner is a YouTube channel featuring videos of Southwest Florida teens reading children’s books. Students are provided corresponding books, allowing them to read alongside their digital reading partners.

Thanks to BelieveNBooks, which has a mission of providing children with books to expand their horizons and enhance their understanding of the world, more than 115 students were given backpacks containing 10 books each, including titles like “Clifford Makes the Team,” “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie,” “Flat Stanley Goes Camping” and more. Parents were provided a postcard with a QR code to quickly access the YouTube video library.

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“I loved getting to meet each of the kids and hearing their comments about the books that they received,” said BelieveNBooks Founder Natasha Agarwal, a 15-year-old freshman at Canterbury School. “It was incredible to see their reactions as they opened their bags and realized that everyone was getting to take the books home. You don’t always have an opportunity to see the people you’re helping, so being there to distribute the books and meet each of the kids made it even more rewarding.”

Shortly after BelieveNBooks launched in 2021, the organization provided more than 3,500 books to Guadalupe Center students following a two-week book collection at Canterbury School. The organization has since supported reading programs through more than a dozen nonprofit partners across Southwest Florida.

The first PageTurner series includes 10 books and corresponding videos, and Agarwal plans to expand the library with additional community support, and perhaps grow PageTurner into a statewide or national program. For more information about BelieveNBooks or to support the PageTurner initiative, please visit BelieveNBooks.org or email info@BelieveNBooks.org.

Love That Dress! event raises funds for Pace Center

Pace Center for Girls, Lee’s popular fundraising event, Love That Dress!, has raised $130,000 to support Pace Lee programs.

Described as the ultimate feel-good shopping spree of the year, Love That Dress! featured shopping, music, silent auctions and cocktails on Aug. 24 at Embassy Suites by Hilton in Estero, where a collection of high-quality, brand-new boutique and gently used dresses, shoes, handbags and accessories were sold at deeply discounted prices.

Proceeds from the event provide academic programs and counseling services to girls and young women ages 11 to 18 who are working to overcome risk factors such as poverty, substance abuse, domestic violence, foster home placement, neglect, grief, incarceration of a family member, mental health and physical, emotional or sexual abuse.

Pace Lee also brought Pace girls to join the Love That Dress! fun on Aug. 25, providing a special shopping session with opportunities for the girls to dress up, shop and have a day of fun.

To learn more about Pace Lee and its programs, visit pacecenter.org/locations/lee or call 239-425-2366.

Alliance gifted sculpture from ArtFest Fort Myers

Alliance for the Arts would like to announce its newest addition to the ever-evolving sculpture park. Flotsam was gifted thanks to an ArtFest program giving a second life to older pieces of art.

Flotsam was created by artist Donald Gialenalla, an artist specializing in the design and fabrication of public art. Known for his larger-than-life sculptures in public and private collections across the United States, his work is installed in over a dozen cities from California to New York, and now the campus of Alliance for the Arts. His background includes teaching art at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, and 10 years as an Emmy-winning TV graphics producer in New York City.

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Flotsam stands 11-feet tall and 20-feet long and was created in the studio and delivered to the site as a finished sculpture. It was originally featured in ArtFest’s We Are Overflowing, an art exhibition created to showcase the pollution problem and the beauty created from upcycling discarded materials. The original installation featured a surrounding 3-foot tall circular low fence approximately 25 feet in diameter into which visitors deposited their empty bottles and cans to fill up the “ocean” around him, covering the wheels and braces with a sea of bottles. Flotsam was made of repurposed plastic and recycled objects firmly attached with stainless hardware to a painted wooden armature.

Alliance for the Arts’ sculpture park is set along McGregor and Royal Palm boulevards and is free and open to the public.

Elite DNA Behavioral Health collects 4,200 school essentials

Elite DNA Behavioral Health, a comprehensive behavioral and mental health care provider, recently hosted a Back-to-School Supplies Drive that collected 4,200 items of school supplies to help area students prepare for the new school year.

The month-long collection was held at Elite DNA’s more than 20 offices across the state and gathered an array of essential classroom items, including notebooks, college and wide-ruled paper, pocket folders, binders, pens, No. 2 and colored pencils, pink erasers, highlighters, pencil boxes, student scissors, glue sticks, wired headphones, sanitizing wipes and more. The drive benefited students in schools across Broward, Charlotte, Clay, Collier, Duval, Hernando, Hillsborough, Lee, Leon, Palm Beach, Polk, Sarasota and Seminole counties.

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This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: YouTube used as a young reader teaching tool by Florida students