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N.C. A&T book festival looks to empower families

North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (N.C. A&T) is hosting its second annual book festival this Saturday.

It’s called the Aggies READ Book Festival, where “READ” stands for Reading Empowers Action and Discovery. 

The event will feature stations with storytellers, authors, dance teams and African drummers — all to help children and their families get excited about reading. 

Kellee Watkins, a literacy professor at N.C. A&T, says this is also a chance for her students, who are aspiring teachers, to practice what they’ve learned about the science of reading.

“So there will be a station for phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. And our literacy scholars are running those stations," Watkins said. "And that's where they're going to train the parents on the five components of reading, like what they can do at home to promote reading and language development.”

The festival is open to the public and will be held at Proctor Hall on N.C. A&T’s campus on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Amy Diaz covers education for WFDD in partnership with Report For America. You can follow her on Twitter at @amydiaze.

Amy Diaz began covering education in North Carolina’s Piedmont region and High Country for WFDD in partnership with Report For America in 2022. Before entering the world of public radio, she worked as a local government reporter in Flint, Mich. where she was named the 2021 Rookie Writer of the Year by the Michigan Press Association. Diaz is originally from Florida, where she interned at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and freelanced for the Tampa Bay Times. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of South Florida, but truly got her start in the field in elementary school writing scripts for the morning news. You can follow her on Twitter at @amydiaze.

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