By Joel Magalnick, Editor, The Jewish Sound
Over the past six years, hundreds of families throughout the Puget Sound region have taken advantage of PJ Library, a program where small children receive a Jewish book each month in the mail. But because the program tops out at age 8, many of those kids who started at the beginning aged out without any kind of follow-up program.
This fall, however, that all changed with the introduction of PJ Our Way, a program aimed at kids ages 9–11. Catriella Freedman, who built the PJ Our Way program for the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, which also founded PJ Library, visited Seattle from Israel in December to help formally launch the program. Freedman said the program is similar in that kids will receive a new book each month, but aside from that, the older kids’ program is very different.
“If we say we’re a program for kids ages 9-11, that means that those are our consumers, as opposed to PJ library, where it’s really the parents and less the kids,” she said.
Perhaps the biggest difference is that for the first time, the kids can go online and choose which books they will receive each month.
“To help them make the selection, the site is populated with content about the books,” Freedman said. “Every book has a short description, it has kid reviews, video trailers, quizzes, polls, information about the author.”
A section for parents can also help with the decision-making process, as well as discussion points for after their child finishes reading.
At the same time, Freedman said, while kids in this age group are beginning to assert their independence, “they also want to show you what they can do and what they can write, and how they can communicate with their peers.”
To that end, the PJ Our Way site (found at www.pjourway.org) also allows the kids to submit the reviews their peers are reading online, post on the blog (which Freedman moderates), and interact with others around the country. In the near future, the kids will also be able to post video trailers of books on the site. All of this was built with the children in mind, coming from their perspectives.
One way to do that is through a national design team made up of one kid from each of the 10 communities across the U.S. that PJ Our Way currently serves. Locally, both this program and PJ Library and are administered by the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, and representatives there enlisted 9-year-old Hadas Dukin to participate on monthly meetings via Google Hangouts to discuss what content should appear on the site and ensure that it’s continually changing.
On his design team bio page on the PJ Our Way site, Hadas wrote that the experience so far has been one he’ll never forget.
“My experience as a part of PJ Our Way was fantastic,” he wrote. “I had so many chances to give input and help the program develop. As a design team we got to name the program, pick a logo, interview authors, and best of all, review the books.”
That level of input was intentional.
“Kids in this age group really don’t want to hear what 45-year-olds have to say,” Freedman said. “They want to feel like it’s a site for them, and that kids are responding to the books.”
The launch of PJ Our Way was more than two years in the making, and much of that was spent researching the available content and the desires of the kids who would be consuming it.
As a mother of four and a Jewish educator, Freedman knows children in this cohort, “but I really wanted to learn more about what makes these kids tick,” she said.
What she learned is that in talking to 500 Jewish kids across the country — and this may come as a disappointment in the land of the Kindle — the majority prefer to read print books. And because different kids have different reading abilities and preferences, the site is built to accommodate those differences as well as provide a place “where they can express themselves and connect with other kids,” she said.
Because Seattle is a pilot city for the program, 100 percent of funding for PJ Our Way comes from the Grinspoon Foundation for its first two years. The foundation funds one-third of the $60-per-year PJ Library subscriptions, with the rest of that funding coming from the Jewish Federation and local donors.
As of mid-December, about 2,000 kids had signed up for PJ Our Way. Given that Seattle constantly falls in the top two of the nation’s well-read cities, it should come as no surprise that the majority of those signups are right here.