During my last week at Scholastic, I had the chance to take part in a special event: Teacher Week. This is a weeklong series of professional development seminars for teachers, offered for free to anyone who registers. In addition to escorting speakers to and from their books signings, managing microphones during Q & A sessions, and generally helping to ensure that everything ran smoothly, I had the chance to sit in on a variety of sessions.

I’ve always loved children’s books; that’s a large part of the reason I wanted to intern at Scholastic. And those sessions showed me how important those books are in the classroom. I learned about how the rhythm of poetry can help kids build reading fluency, and about how genres that adults tend to dismiss (like romance and fantasy) help teenagers build critical thinking skills and self-awareness. In light of the growing “We Need Diverse Books” movement, one of our most popular sessions was a panel about diversity in children’s literature. Four Scholastic authors spoke about the importance of children seeing themselves and the people around them in the books they read.

Now I’m back at Holy Cross, and back at the SPUD site I’ve been with since freshman year. I volunteer in an elementary school classroom, during the English-Language Arts period. As I lead the reading groups and watch the kids read independently, the messages I heard at Teacher Week keep coming back to me.

The kids read more fluently when I show them how to practice the rhythm and cadence of the words.

Even though the teacher groans when a student selects Captain Underpants for the fifth time, he’s enjoying the book and improving his skills – and that’s what matters.

These kids deserve to see themselves in the books they read.

I don’t know where my future career will eventually lead – publishing, education, or something else entirely. But wherever I go, I know that the importance of books and reading will stay with me.

As of this week, I am just over halfway through my internship at Scholastic. At moments like this, it’s tempting to ask where the time has gone, but I already know the answer to that question. It’s disappeared into the projects I’ve been working on, of course!

Every summer, the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge encourages kids to keep track of how many minutes they read while on school break, aiming to prevent the effects of the “summer slide” – the learning losses that can occur during the summer months. On July 9, the participants broke the 2013 world record for minutes read (176,438,473!), and they’re on track to hit the 200 million mark very soon. Kids can also link their tallies to their schools; bestselling author Gordon Korman (The Hypnotists) and bestselling author-illustrator David Shannon (Bugs in My Hair!) will visit the U.S. middle school and top U.S. elementary school, respectively, with the most minutes logged.

This year, Scholastic worked closely with a team of top parent bloggers to help promote the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge. I already knew that parent bloggers (often called mommy bloggers, though that’s not fair to the dads among them) were a “thing.” But seeing the responses to their posts about the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge made me realize what a powerful force they are for spreading the word about something child-related. It does make a lot of sense when you think about it, though. Not many people are more passionate about ways to help kids learn and grow and have fun than moms and dads. And blogs about parenting really get read because so many people are parents, and of course they’re looking online for information and community.

I’ve been formatting and printing clips of parent bloggers’ coverage of the Summer Reading Challenge; these will eventually go into a binder that records the initiative’s overall efforts and successes. More and more coverage comes in every week, and it’s pretty impressive when you see it all together! I also compiled a roundup of good things that parenting bloggers have had to say about the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge for Scholastic’s On Our Minds blog. If you want to read that, and to see some adorable pictures of bloggers’ children with the books Scholastic sent them, you can click here.

A couple weeks ago, I also wrote another blog post to commemorate the anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird on July 11. Shoutout to my seventh grade literature teacher, Mrs. Zehring, for doing an amazing job teaching the book and for writing the thought-provoking exam question that inspired the post.

Speaking of the school I attended in Memphis, this weekend I took a peek at how they and some other schools I’m familiar with are doing in the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge. (Scholastic’s website offers all participants the chance to see a school’s total minutes read.) Those schools are doing pretty well, considering how small they are. It almost makes me want to join the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge myself, even though I’m a good seven years past the age limit. I wonder if Greek textbooks and mommy blogs count as summer reading?

See you next week!

When I was in Greece, I attended Easter services on the island of Tinos. It’s traditional in many parts of Greece to set off fireworks at midnight on Holy Saturday, and that’s exactly what happened. People were shooting them from the courtyard of the church, less than a hundred feet away from where I was standing. Combine that with dynamite, and it was the most terrifying experience of my life. But at the same time, it was exhilarating. In that courtyard, surrounded by thousands of locals celebrating the most important holiday of the year, I really felt like part of the community.

Last Friday, I went onto my rooftop to watch the Macy’s fireworks for Independence Day. Since my apartment is very close to the Brooklyn Promenade, one of the official viewing spots, we were bound to have a good view. Turns out there were a couple taller buildings that blocked about a third of the fireworks, but I’ll take a little obstruction over the chaos of the Promenade any day.

A partially obstructed view of the fireworks, but a gorgeous view of Lower Manhattan!

As on Tinos, there were too many people too close for my comfort. (Many of my building’s residents invited friends, and a few random tourists also appeared to have wandered up.) And as on Tinos, the fireworks were close enough to send me back to my apartment with smoke in my eyes and ash in my hair.

But you know what? When I saw the reflection of the fireworks in the glass of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, and the spire of One World Trade Center in lights, everything was worth it. And when somebody put on a playlist of patriotic music and the guys started a chant of “USA! USA!” that spread to other Brooklyn rooftops, I once again felt like part of a community.

Like many students who study abroad, I returned slightly disillusioned about the US’s role in world affairs. But Friday night reminded me that ultimately, I’m still very proud to be American.

In spite of spending six months in Greece and studying on my own in between semesters, I somehow left Athens under the impression that I could not speak Modern Greek at all. Although I understood most of what people said to me, I rarely uttered anything beyond “Good morning,” “How much does this cost?” and “I would like a chicken gyro.” The locals were appreciative of my attempts at Greek, but they also wanted to try out their English on me, and would insist on switching languages as soon as I made a mistake. So I didn’t get to practice as much as I would have liked to in Athens.

As you may remember from my first blog post, I’d like to go back to Greece someday. With that goal in mind, I decided to enroll in a Greek class for the summer. This has the added bonus of giving me a life in New York outside my internship and providing something constructive to do during my commute. (I love to read on the subway, but books can be unwieldy, especially when I’m standing. The flashcards and printouts my instructor uses are much easier to handle.)

My lessons are one-on-one with a native speaker, and so far, it’s working well for me. I can go at my ideal pace, and she can tailor the curriculum to what I want to learn. We’ve just ended the second week of lessons, and in those two weeks, I’ve discovered something amazing.

I actually do speak Greek.

At the end of our first lesson, my instructor pronounced me crazy for labeling myself a beginner. While I’m guessing she has a different definition of “beginner” than my study abroad program and I do, I’m still shocked at how easy it is to talk to her. Earlier this week we had a twenty-minute conversation. A real, relevant conversation, not one of the canned scenarios you so often see in language classes. And I knew exactly what she was saying to me, and had no trouble coming up with appropriate things to say back.

I’m not sure why Greek seems so much easier now. Maybe it’s because sitting in a classroom with a nice teacher is much easier than sitting in pain in a foreign hospital. Maybe it’s because I know the instructor doesn’t expect me to speak perfectly (unlike the people of Athens, who often expected fluency based on my Greekish appearance).

Or maybe I was just way too hard on myself during my time abroad.

No matter what the case is, though, I’m learning well and enjoying it. And when I do go back to Greece, I’ll have a real shot at saying something besides “I want a chicken gyro.”

I’m two weeks into my internship at Scholastic, and so far, things are going great! I’ve been quite busy both in and out of work. I’ll provide an update on the cool things I’m doing outside the office shortly, but first, here are the highlights of my first week at Scholastic:

• Tomorrow, June 21st, the Scholastic Store in SoHo will be hosting a event called Clifford’s Beach Party. Last Friday, a promo for that event aired on a local news channel. A few days beforehand, I got to go to the NY1 studios and help with the filming. I prepared Clifford for his appearance and tossed beach balls to him from off-screen! I also met Shelley Goldberg, who hosts NY1’s parenting segment and is something of a local celebrity.

• Also last week, Scholastic announced that they’ll be teaming up with Netflix to revive the Magic School Bus. A new computer-animated program called The Magic School Bus 360° will appear in 2016. I personally could not be more excited about this – I watched the original show religiously as a child, and am seriously considering buying a subscription to Netflix for the sole purpose of watching the new version. Part of my job is to examine media outlets and see which ones have picked up this story (and other stories about Scholastic). Newspapers, blogs, radio stations, TV news outlets – there are a lot of other people as excited about the Magic School Bus as I am.

• Finally, my Bookprint – a list of the five books that have most influence my life – appeared yesterday on Scholastic’s On Our Minds (OOM) blog. You can read it here. Creating your Bookprint is a sort of tradition for new Scholastic employees; they’ve done it with many celebrities too. I hope to generate more content for OOM in the coming weeks.

That about sums it up! Now that I’m settled into a rhythm with my life in New York, I hope to blog here more frequently. Hopefully I’ll see you next week.

Hello, everybody! My name is Melissa Luttmann, and I’m a classics major, class of 2015. I’ll be blogging this summer about my internship in the Corporate Communications department at Scholastic. This is the only post I’ll have time for before my internship begins–I start on Monday!

I spent my junior year abroad in Athens, Greece, which was amazing. I traveled all over the country, learned to speak some modern Greek, and ate a lot of amazing food! While I was there, I also interned at Repower Greece, an organization that’s dedicated to spreading positive messages about the country.

On top of Mt. Lycabettus, the highest point in Athens, with the Acropolis in the background.

I absolutely loved Greece and the people I met there, and I was so sad to leave. (I want to go back someday!) But Scholastic is an awesome place to be leaving for. I love children’s books; I’ve been writing middle grade and YA novels as a hobby for years. It’s natural to want to know what goes on behind the scenes when you’re a writer, so working at a children’s publishing house has long been a dream of mine.

Scholastic is also a name that conjures up lots of nice memories for me. In elementary school, I read their classroom magazines and bought countless titles from their book fairs. They’re also the people that brought you the Magic School Bus and Clifford the Big Red Dog, two of my favorite childhood series. This is a company whose work I’m really passionate about–which is a good thing, because as an intern in the Corporate Communications department, I’ll be helping to communicate all the awesome things Scholastic is doing to the media.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading about my experiences working at this amazing company and living at NYC. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you once a week this summer!