(Radio Iowa) A program called Read Across Iowa offers the state’s elementary school teachers free books, lesson plans and activities for their classrooms during March, with a focus on food and agriculture. Professor Constance Beecher, in Iowa State University’s School of Education, organizes the annual effort, which has reached some 72-thousand young Iowans in all 99 counties just in the few years it’s been around. “It’s really a month-long celebration, kind of a public service campaign, about the importance of reading,” Beecher says, “and especially thinking about the links between reading and agriculture in our state.”

In the next few weeks, volunteers will pack up one-thousand book kits to ship out to hundreds of teachers statewide. Teachers were able to sign up for the give-a ways online starting in mid-January and already, all one-thousand kits have been snapped up. “We don’t have a budget for this,” Beecher says. “It’s all sort of goodwill. We go out and try to get grants and so we landed on 1,000 books just as a nice round number of what we thought we could raise some money for, so it’s basically a first come-first serve basis.”

While the free books are gone, she says teachers can still get the lesson plans and other elements of the program on the website. Beecher, who’s the family literacy state specialist through Human Sciences Extension and Outreach, says it’s vital to read to young children for language and literacy development, and the program is helping students to reach new heights. “We’ve changed the theme each year to make it fun and interesting,” Beecher says. “So, last year we had a farm-to-table theme. This year, our theme is food science, so we’re really looking at the science of different kinds of food.”

Continuing with this year’s food science theme, several of the books focus on topics like bread baking, making ice cream and turning grapes into jelly. They’re accompanied by links to simple recipes and video recordings with the authors. “One of our books is called ‘Bread Lab’ and it was written by people who actually work in the bread lab at Washington State University,” Beecher says. “Kids might not realize that there’s so much science behind recipes and developing food and food safety and that there’s all these really great careers.”

The I-S-U Extension is also partnering with Iowa 4-H and the Iowa Agriculture Literacy Foundation on the program.