(cheerful guitar music) (feet shuffling) - Okay.

I think I've got what I need for tonight's campfire.

Oh, Hey.

Hi, campers.

I'm Mrs. Hammock.

Welcome to Camp Read A Lot.

I am so excited that you're here with me today.

We are going to have so much fun at Camp Read A Lot.

We're gonna sing and read and talk.

And we're going to do all kinds of activities that will help us to become strong readers.

Parents, there are things that you can do too.

Did you know that reading aloud benefits everybody, children and teens.

One benefit is that you can read books that they're not able to read yet.

And that will build their listening comprehension and help them with skills at grade level books and above.

And it will also increase their knowledge and their experience with text or with books.

So choose one of those classic favorites that you loved.

Maybe Charlotte's Web, maybe Journey to the Center of the Earth, Island of the Blue Dolphins.

I'm not sure what you loved, but I know I loved those.

And you can read aloud a chapter a night for the whole family.

What a great time to share and celebrate books.

And in the meantime, you'll be helping your kids be strong readers.

So I hope you'll take advantage of that.

All right, campers.

Are you ready for our song?

♪ Hello readers ♪ ♪ Hello writers ♪ ♪ Hello campers.

I'm glad you're here today ♪ ♪ Hello readers.

♪ ♪ Hello writers.

♪ ♪ Hello campers.

I'm glad you're here today.

♪ Let's do our Camp Read A Lot pledge.

Okay?

Let's get our salute.

Now, repeat after me.

On my honor.

I will try my best to be kind to everyone, to have a smile on my face and a song in my heart.

Excellent job.

All right, campers.

Well, I have a great story for you today about curiosity.

And, do you remember what that means?

It means when you wonder about things and you have questions about things and you want to know more about different things.

And I have the perfect story.

But before we get to that, we need to train our ears for sound.

So let me get my ears to remind you that when you listen to sounds, and then you think about the sounds and the letters, that will help to grow your reading brain.

So we're gonna play a sound game today.

Something you're really good at.

We're gonna do some rhyming pictures.

Do you see him?

Do you know where he is?

I was out collecting some kindling for our fire tonight, in our fire ring.

And I should have known better.

I should have taken him with me, but Scooter did not come with me.

And now he's not where I left him.

Do you see him anywhere?

Let's call him together.

Ready?

Scooter!

Oh, Scooter.

Where are you?

Oh, what?

Oh, (chuckles) he's right here by my feet.

What are you doing down here?

Oh, you're looking at a beam of light.

Why are you looking at a beam of light?

Oh, okay.

Oh, he wants you to know that.

Can I turn your beam of light off?

Okay, good.

He wants you to know that today, the name of our story is, On a Beam of Light.

You're so clever.

You're such a clever little squirrel.

Yes, I know.

So you were preparing for our story today.

Okay.

I love that idea.

But before we do that, are you ready to play the rhyming game?

Yes?

Great.

All right.

Well, I used to pictures, so maybe you can help us out.

Are you ready?

Come on.

Let's look at our pictures today.

All right.

Let's look at the first row.

Now, your job and yours is to figure out which two words rhyme.

Two of them rhyme, one does not.

And let's see if you can figure out which one or which two do and which one doesn't.

You ready to try it?

Great.

Okay.

Are you ready?

Oh, perfect.

All right.

Can you see them?

All right.

Let me get, Okay.

There we go.

We have dish pail, fish.

Do you hear two that rhyme?

What's that?

Oh, I should remind them what rhyming, Oh, you're right.

That's a great idea.

So, Scooter would like me to remind you that rhyming words have the same ending sound.

Okay?

So they have the same ending part, actually, okay.

Is that what you wanted me to say?

Yes.

Okay.

So, dish, pail, fish.

Which two rhyme.

Yes.

Good.

Dish and fish rhyme because they both say -ish.

Dish, fish.

They both say -ish.

Great job.

All right.

Let's look at our next one.

Ready?

I know this looks like a duck but really it's a goose.

Say it with me, Goose, moose, snail.

Oh, he said, "That one was too easy."

Was it too easy for you?

It was?

Ah, Goose, moose.

They both say, -oose.

Terrific.

You're getting really good at rhyming.

All right.

Let's do one last one.

You ready?

Frog, mop, top.

Oh yeah, they do.

You're right.

He said, "They both have the -og sound."

But that's not what we're looking for today.

Do you remember what we're looking for?

Right.

The ending part.

So let's see.

Frog has, -org.

Mop has, -op.

And top has, -op.

Did you hear it?

Top, Mop, top, they both say -op.

Great job.

Very nicely done.

Well today, our story is called, On a Beam of Light.

And it's about a scientist.

And so, because we're talking about scientists, I have a joke about a scientist.

Are you ready?

Okay, here we go.

How do scientists freshen their breath?

Hmm.

He's thinking, he's thinking.

Do you know?

How do they freshen their breath?

With experiments.

(laughing loudly) Get it?

Scientists do experiments.

And a mint is something you put in your mouth to freshen your breath.

That's a good one.

Oh gosh.

That was good.

All right.

Are you ready for our story?

Yes.

(chuckles) I know.

I know that was a silly one.

Let's do our catch of the day.

Okay.

All right.

That means you have to sit in your story spot.

Are you ready?

Okay.

Let's do it right.

Oh, oh, oh.

Good job.

All right.

Today we have some words that will help us with our story.

The first word is wonder.

Wonder.

Wondering is a cause of surprise or astonishment or admiration.

Like, I wonder, and you're just admiring something or you're just amazed by something.

That is wonder.

We have beam.

Do you know what beam is?

Right.

Like a beam of light.

It's like a stream of light.

Good job.

And hardly, hardly.

Hardly means very little.

I hardly had any coffee this morning.

Very little.

(laughing) All right.

Let's get to our story.

I'm gonna put on my reading tools.

And remember, we all use tools of some kind to make us stronger and better and be our best.

So if you use reading tools like me, don't be embarrassed or don't be shy.

Make sure you put them on your eyes.

Everybody needs a little help once in awhile.

All right.

Our story is called, On a Beam of Light.

A story of Albert Einstein.

Have you heard of Albert Einstein before?

Hmm.

I bet if I showed you a picture of him, you would recognize him because he's kind of famous.

Yeah.

And he's his picture is in a lot of different places.

The story is written by Jennifer Byrne and pictures are by Vladimir Radensky.

Ooh.

What a great name.

Vladimir.

That's a fun one to say.

All right.

So let's take a look.

Here's our front cover.

And this is a picture of Albert Einstein.

A drawing of him, but it's hard to see.

So I'll show you one later.

This is the back cover.

And remember sometimes stories tell us a little bit about them in the back so we can decide if that's a story we wanna read.

Here's the spine of our book.

Do you remember what this page is called?

Right?

The title page.

Good for you.

All right.

And this one has a dedication page.

That means the author and the illustrator dedicated it to some months special.

Here's another title page.

What can you tell by looking at the title page?

I see books too.

Yeah.

And I see a dog and a cat.

And there he is.

Hmm, let's find out about him.

Over 100 years ago as the stars swirled the sky, as the earth circled the sun, as the March winds blew through a little town by a river, a baby boy was born.

His parents named him, Albert.

(page shuffling) Albert turned one year old and he didn't say a word Albert turned two.

And he didn't say a word.

Albert turned three and he hardly said a word at all.

Now, for those of you that have brothers and sisters that are one, two and three, you know that as babies grow, they start to babble and make sounds and talk and say one word, mama, dada, right?

Well, not Albert.

So by the time he was three, he was not really talking very much.

Do you think maybe his parents were worried?

If I was his mom, I would be a little worried that he wasn't talking very much at all.

I wonder, why?

I'm curious why.

(pages shuffling) He just looked around with his big curious eyes.

He looked and wondered.

Looked and wondered.

His parents worried.

Little Albert was so different.

Was there something wrong?

But he was their baby, so they loved him no matter what.

(page shuffling) One day when Albert was sick in bed, his father brought him a compass, a small round case with a magnetic needle inside.

No matter which way Albert turned the compass, the needle always pointed north, as if held by an invisible hand.

Albert was so amazed his body trembled.

That means he was like shaking.

Suddenly, he knew there were mysteries in the world, hidden and silent, unknown and unseen.

He wanted more than anything to understand those mysteries.

(pages shuffling) Albert started asking questions.

Questions at home questions at school.

So many questions that some of his teachers told him he was disrupting to the class.

They said he would never amount to anything unless he learned to behave like the other students.

But Albert didn't want to be like the other students.

He wanted to discover the hidden mysteries of the world.

Have you heard that before?

(chuckles) Sometimes, Sometimes we teachers, sometimes we say things that we maybe need to think about.

One day as Albert was zipping through the countryside on his bicycle, he looked up at the beams of sunlight, speeding from the sun to the earth.

He wondered what would it be like to ride on one of those beams.

And in his mind right then and there, Albert was no longer on his bicycle, no longer on a country road.

He wasn't racing through space on a beam of light.

It was the biggest, most exciting thought Albert had ever had.

And it filled his mind with questions.

Can you imagine what that would be like to ride on a beam of light?

Albert began to read study.

He read about light and sound and heat and magnetism and about gravity.

The invisible force that pulls us down toward our planet and keeps the moon from floating away in outer space.

Look at all those books he's reading.

Do you think he had a strong reading brain?

I think he did it.

(pages shuffling) And he read about numbers.

Albert loved numbers.

They were like a secret language for figuring things out.

But all that reading still didn't answer all of his questions.

So he kept on reading and he kept on wondering and he kept on learning.

(pages shuffling) When Albert graduated from college, he wanted to teach the subjects that he loved.

All the things he had read about all those years.

But Albert couldn't find a job as a teacher.

So he got another job, a simple, quiet government, A job in the government office.

An office, where he worked with other people's ideas and inventions.

He did his work very well and very quickly.

So quickly that he had lots of extra time to think and wonder.

(pages shuffling) Albert watched a lump of sugar dissolve into his hot tea.

Hmm.

"I wonder how this could happen," he thought.

He watched the smoke from his pipe swirl and disappear in the air.

How could one thing disappear into another?

(pages shuffling) Then he began to figure it out.

He thought about the idea that everything is made out of teeny tiny moving bits of stuff.

Far too tiny to see little bits called atoms.

Some people didn't believe that atoms exist.

But Albert figuring helped prove that everything in our world is made up of atoms.

Even sugar and tea and smoke and air.

Even Albert and you and me.

Even this book is made up of atoms.

(page shuffling) Then Albert thought about motion.

He realized that everything is always moving.

Moving through space, moving through time, even sound asleep, we're moving.

Did you know that?

Our planet circles the sun and our lives travel into the future.

Albert saw time and space as no one had ever seen it before.

(pages shuffling) Albert wrote down his new ideas and put them into envelopes and sent them to science magazines.

The magazines printed everything that he sent.

He hoped that scientists and professors would be interested.

And they were very interested indeed.

They asked Albert to come work with them and to teach them.

For the first time in life, people started to say, "Albert is that genius."

Now Albert could spend all day long doing what he loved.

Imagining, wondering, figuring and thinking.

Albert Einstein is a genius.

(pages shuffling) Albert thought about very, very big things like the size and shape of the entire universe.

But he also thought about very, very small things.

Like what goes on inside the atoms that everything is made of.

He thought about mysterious forces like magnetism and gravity.

He discovered whole new ways to understand how all these things work.

(page shuffling) Everywhere Albert went, he would think and think and wonder.

One of Albert's favorite places was his little sailboat.

He loved to let his mind wander as the wind blew him across the water.

Sometimes when Albert was having a tough time with a tricky problem, he would put it aside and play his violin.

Music made Albert happy.

He said, "It helped him to think better."

Did you know that's true?

Yeah.

Music does help people to think better.

Albert even chose his clothes for thinking.

His favorite were comfy old saggy, baggy sweaters and pants and shoes without socks.

He said, now that he was a grownup, no one could tell him to put on his socks.

"My feet are happier without socks."

Are your feet happier without socks?

In the town where he lived, he became known for wandering around deep in thought.

Sometimes eating an ice cream cone.

Always recognizable with his long, wild, crazy hair, which by then had become quite white.

(pages shuffling) Everywhere.

Albert went, he tried to figure out the secrets of the universe and he never forgot about that beam of light that he wrote a long time ago in his imagination.

Albert figured out that no person, no thing, could ever zoom through space as fast as a beam of light.

(pages shuffling) He figured that if he could travel near the speed of light, crazy things would happen.

Only minutes would pass for Albert while years and years would pass for the rest of us.

This idea was so amazing, people didn't believe it at first.

But scientists today have proven, it is true.

(pages shuffling) Albert thought and figured until the very last minute of the very last day of his life.

He asked questions that no one had ever asked before.

And he found answers that no one had ever found before.

And he dreamed up ideas, never even dreamed before.

Albert's ideas helped build spaceships and satellites that traveled to the moon and beyond.

His thinking, helped us understand our universe as no one had ever done before.

But still Albert left us many big questions.

Questions that scientists are still working on today.

There's a better picture of what he looks like.

Does he look familiar to you?

Have you seen him?

Have you seen pictures of him?

Yeah.

(pages shuffling) Questions that someday you might answer by wondering, thinking and imagining.

(pages shuffling) Wow.

And then there are some facts about him from the author.

"Albert Einstein was an extraordinary, fascinating person.

I feel fortunate for the time that I spent exploring his thrilling ideas and his intriguing universe while researching and writing for this book.

Albert Einstein's life was so big.

And this book is so short.

I couldn't find fit everything in, but here are a few important events."

And then she tells about some of them.

And if you wanna know more about this amazing scientist, full of curiosity, you can find out more about him and read some more about him.

I hope that Albert Einstein, inspires you to keep being curious and to keep asking questions.

I always admire people that, their brains think of these kinds of questions, because it's so amazing what you can come up with.

And not only did he wonder and ask questions, but he worked to figure out the answers.

He didn't always get all of the answers.

That's where you come in.

Maybe you are going to be a scientist one day, and you're gonna find some of the answers of the questions that Albert Einstein left for us.

That would be so cool.

All right.

I love this story.

Let's take a look here and we're gonna talk for a second about the words and the illustrations of our story.

When we read stories, we can get information, not just from the text, but also from the pictures.

And this is a great example.

So my first question for you is, is this a non-fiction story or a fiction story?

Now, remember, fiction is make-believe, non-fiction is true.

So what do you think?

Yes, it is a non-fiction story.

It's about a real person and we learned facts about his real life.

That's awesome.

So, what do you think the author's reason or purpose for writing this story, was?

It was to inform us about Albert Einstein's life and to tell us more about him.

And we learned that from the passage, that means the words where it tells of when Albert was sick in bed and holding a compass, his father brought him.

And we also saw the illustration of Albert looking at the compass.

That is really where his curiosity started, right?

I bet his dad had no idea when he gave him that little compass, what he was doing and what that would mean for Albert.

How awesome is that?

All right.

I have a project that we're gonna do.

But before we do, I have a little joke for you.

Another scientist joke.

Are you ready?

How about you?

Scooter.

Are you ready to hear it?

Okay.

Why did the scientist take out his doorbell?

He wanted to win the Nobel prize.

(laughing) Oh gosh, that's good.

Do you know what the Nobel prize is?

No.

Oh, well then it's probably not that funny for you.

Let's go to the table.

Come on.

We're gonna bring our book with us because today boys and girls and campers, all campers alike, we are going to, We're gonna draw a picture of Albert Einstein.

And I'm gonna use this as my inspiration.

Now don't worry.

I know some of you are saying, "I know, but I can't draw."

Don't worry about that.

You're gonna do the best you can.

You're gonna start with a pencil.

And you're just gonna give it a little sketch.

So you can look at a picture of him.

Maybe your mom or dad can pull up a picture on their phone.

Because what I want you to do when you get your picture of Albert Einstein, I know that's really hard to see.

But when you get your picture of him, I want you to write a bunch of things that you wonder about.

And when you look at that picture, it will help you remember to always be wondering.

♪ Skidamarink, a dink, a dink ♪ ♪ Skidamarink, a do ♪ ♪ I love you.

♪ ♪ Skidamarink, a dink, a dink ♪ ♪ Skidamarink, a do ♪ ♪ I love you ♪ ♪ I love you in the morning ♪ ♪ And in the afternoon ♪ ♪ I love villain evening ♪ ♪ And underneath the moon ♪ I wonder if I'll see you tomorrow.

Bye, bye.

(cheerful guitar music)