(Guest post from Janelle Diller)

What a challenging time this is for everyone!

There’s nothing easy about sheltering in place and helping your kids with online learning for the first time. It’s only a small consolation that we have plenty of company (hundreds of millions!) in this new reality. To give you an extra hand Pack-n-Go Girls Adventures has pulled together some suggestions for extra resources for keeping your kids reading and even thriving. Check out this list:

Ways to Keep Kids Reading During Distance Learning and Quarantine:

• For a short time, Pack-n-Go Girls is offering their Color Your World printable coloring book for free. This coloring book takes your young artist to Austria, Brazil, Mexico, and Thailand along with the Pack-n-Go Girls. With 70 pages filled with entertaining activities and engaging illustrations to color, it’s the perfect way to keep your kids busy when you need to take a call, tackle some work, or even just catch a break.
• Stepping into the online education world has been daunting for most schools, especially because it’s been done in crunch time. If your school is on top of challenging your child with on-line learning–great! If not, this curated guide of free resources and subscriptions for remote learning and homeschooling from New York City Public Schools is a keeper!
• And here’s another list of resources for elementary school kids. There’s lots of free stuff as well as free trials that last several months.
• Publishers Weekly has also compiled a cool list of ways publishers and children’s authors are stepping up and giving. Of course, Pack-n-Go is contributing to this effort too.
• Pack-n-Go Girls Adventures is up teaming up with MackinVIA, the digital resource management system of Mackin, to let you in on the best deal your school’s library is ever going to get. Through MackinVIA, Pack-n-Go Girls Adventures is allowing FREE use of their multi-user ebooks and audiobooks through September 30, 2020. MackinVIA is also offering thousands of other titles for free as publishers permit. In addition, Mackin is offering all its Mackin Classics (over 1,500 titles) as free multi-user titles to all K-12 schools to help educators provide more ebooks and audiobooks to all their students. To access these titles, your librarian can go to the MackinVIA promotions page and start downloading. If your school doesn’t have MackinVIA, they can request it from Mackin.
• Findaway, which is the primary source all the major audiobook distributors use, is also offering free audiobooks for library use for a limited time. Overdrive, Bibliotheca, Odilo, hoopla, and dozens of the other audiobook distributors are participating, so have your school librarian check with their source for acquiring audiobooks. Pack-n-Go, of course, is part of this giveaway as well.
• Now, more than ever, we need to be resilient in the face of all the challenges, not just for ourselves, but also for our children. We need to be able to bounce back from the changes life has brought us. If you’re feeling particularly depleted (and hooray if you’re not!), here are some tactical ways to build your resilience and your children’s resilience.

FREE Resources for Learning from Multicultural Children’s Book Day

• Free Multicultural Books for Teachers
• Our New FREE Teacher Classroom Physical and Developmental Challenges Kit http://ow.ly/kcbZ30p3QWz
• Free Empathy Classroom Kit for Homeschoolers, Organizations, Librarians, and Educators
• Free Understanding Developmental & Physical Challenges Classroom Kit

We ALL want to keep our kids reading, not just because reading expands their world, but also because it takes them into other worlds and lets them escape some of the stresses of this one. Now is the time to make sure all children still have access to the books and resources that will inspire them to read more. We are all in this together 🙂

Pack-N-Go Girls

Dreaming of true-blue friends, mysterious adventures, and faraway places? Pack-n-Go Girls take you there!