Mallett School’s Prime Time Reading, aka Jammie Night, continues to be my favorite event of the year. It takes place during Mallet’s Community Book Week, which also features the adorable Book Character parade (see below). Apart from having great company, Jammie Night has some of the best ingredients an event could possibly be made of: a shared love of reading, widespread community support and partnerships, pajamas, great authors, a great crowd, and amazing decorations. First, here is a scene from this year’s Book Character Parade, which takes place downtown.

Adorable, eh? All right, so here is how Prime Time Reading night works. The Mallett community comes back to school at 6:00 in the evening, parents, kids, teachers, librarian, and principal, all dressed in their pajamas for an evening of read alouds. I produce a children’s book author. The evening starts with that author reading his book to the assembled throng in the gymnasium, which has been lavishly decorated around the book’s theme. Afterwords families can either go listen to one of five different community readers in five different classrooms, read together in the gym, or purchase a book and have the guest author sign it. The evening ends with the author reading a second book to the whole audience and then concludes with goodnights and more book signing.
In 2016 our special guest was the terrific Maine author and illustrator Matt Tavares. Matt’s books often feature baseball history themes, which were very evident in the evening’s amazing decorations. Let’s have a look at them before the families have arrived.

Here’s Matt standing next to a figure from his Henry Aaron’s Dream.

These amazing decorations were the work of a team spearheaded by Mallet’s fab librarian Amanda Paradis Roberts, pictured here along with Matt and the splendid splinter himself, Ted Williams!

The pajama-wearing crowd filed in and was mighty pumped up.

Now it was time to introduce Matt along with our special guests, the University of Maine at Farmington baseball team. With Hank Aaron on the team I figure they are having a good year.

And then it was showtime!

The book sale/signing was robust and very cute.

Then it was time for some thank you notes.

And a thank you and good night from Amanda and Mallet’s sensational principal Tracy Williamson, on the right. Thanks, Matt!