Granton Area School District awarded grant for book trail
The Granton Area School District, in cooperation with the Granton Community Library, Granton Green Team and the Granton FFA, will install a book trail in its school forest after receiving a $4,000 grant from the Eat Right, Be Fit Coalition of Clark County. The book trail, named “Trails and Tales,” will be the first trail of its kind in the county and is expected to be opened in June.
The grant was presented to the school on May 8 by Rebecca Greisen, the health educator/public health specialist from the Clark County Health Department and a representative of the Eat Right, Be Fit Coalition. The coalition, Greisen said, had collaborated with the Aspirus Stanley Hospital earlier this year to get the funding for the grant, with the goal to give families in Clark County a place to go for learning.
“Our group works to provide early learning and literacy education,” she said. “This gives families an option, something that they can do together.”
This will be the first time that the Eat Right, Be Fit Coalition will be working with the Granton Area School District on a project. Having completed their application with a strong vision of what they wanted, Greisen said the school was chosen to be the first location of a book trail in Clark County. Other book trails are expected to be installed in Neillsville and Abbotsford sometime in the near future through partnerships with other groups as libraries look to expand their outreach into their local communities.
“Eat Right, Be Fit has never worked with Granton before on a project,” she said. “They had a set goal in mind and a plan of what they wanted and how it could be carried out and how it would benefit the community. They had specs, examples and went above and beyond to show what they wanted to implement.”
“Libraries are thinking differently,” added Kay Heiting, the library media specialist at the Granton Community Library. “We’re not just here for people to come in and see books. The interaction with the community is important. We have been asking, ‘How do we bring the books to the people?’” In the plan, the Trails and Tales book trail will run through the Granton School Forest located behind the school. Temporary signposts will be placed along the trail with laminated pages from a book chosen by the library.
“We will have a storybook, take it apart and laminate it,” said Heiting. “Each page will be placed along the trail, and people can walk along the trail to read a page from the book. At the end, there will be an activity they can complete that will be related to what they have learned. For example, if they read a book on tracking, they will be able to make track stamps.”
Heiting said they are planning to have three books used each year, rotating the stories out during the spring, summer and fall before being closed down in the winter. While the books themselves will be chosen with children and adult readers in mind, she said all the books will have some kind of environmental theme to educate anyone taking a walk down the trail.
“We plan to have a new book for the spring, summer and fall,” she said. “There is no reading level in mind; it’s made to be entertaining for both children and adults so everyone has an opportunity to enjoy these books. We have three books in mind to use this year and they are all environmentally based.”
The trail itself will be maintained by the Granton ag department, FFA and Green Team organizations, all organizations that currently do work in the school forest. K-12 Principal Amanda Kraus said the first step in getting the forest ready for use as a book trail would be handled by students during their Earth Day cleanup event held in the afternoon of May 8.
“We have our Earth Day event that will have our students restore some of our trails to get it ready for use,” she said. “We hope to have it ready to be used in time for summer school in June.”
After it is open, Heiting and Kraus said the trail will be a resource for the entire community to be able to enjoy.
“Basically this is something that can be used by our school, our daycare and our community,” said Heiting. “It checks off a lot of boxes.”
“The community is such a big part of Granton,” added Kraus. “This is something they can go out and use and learn about the environment.”
CHEYENNE THOMAS/STAFF PHOTO
