The summer slide isn’t a piece of playground equipment or even a toy at the local town pool.
While it sounds like something fun, it’s anything but that. Rather, the summer slide is something that parents need to fight against during these warm months.
The summer slide is the well-documented decrease in reading ability that occurs when kids don’t engage in learning over the summer. When children take a break from reading, their abilities recede and as that loss compounds over the years, some kids are left years behind their actual grade level.
To combat the summer slide, one community is looking to a bright yellow bicycle for answers. The city of Longmont, Colorado is launching a book-bicycle-centered outreach effort to try to reach kids whose parents don’t bring them to the library. Friends of the Longmont Library funded the $6,000 BookCycle that features a bubble machine and handle-mounted pinwheels, as well as a cargo hold for dozens of books and a Wi-Fi station that anyone can use.
Library employees will pedal the BookCycle to public events this summer, where they will host story times; they’ll also have the ability to make library cards on the spot. “We’re hoping the mobility will allow us to reach underserved areas and bring the books straight to them,” Elektra Greer, head of Longmont Library’s children and teens department, told Whitney Bryen of the Longmont Times-Call.
People in this Rocky Mountain community can expect to find the BookCycle at the farmer’s market, free public concerts, the First Friday Art Walk on Main Street, and many other events.
Now the librarians just need to learn to steer it — which can be difficult when the BookCycle is loaded up with books. So in preparation for pedaling season, the staff is taking lessons from Longmont Bicycles.
With any luck, they will return to the library from each of their outings with an empty BookCycle, leaving behind many kids with their noses buried in books.
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Tag: books
How One Organization Encourages the Love of Reading
Clifford. Harry Potter. The Boxcar Children. These storybook characters have entertained and inspired countless American children. And now, they can do the same for a whole group of immigrant kids.
Some new book worms at the Integrated Arts Academy, a school that serves many English-language-learning students whose parents emigrated from countries such as Somalia, Nepal, and South Sudan, in Burlington, Vermont, took home free reading material this week, thanks to the Children’s Literacy Foundation (CLF). This nonprofit aims to inspire a love of reading in low-income and rural children in New Hampshire and Vermont. According to CLF’s website, it has served 150,000 children since 1998 — donating more than $3 million worth of books. Donations from the community make it possible for the kids to start their own home libraries.
This year, Duncan McDougall of CLF gave the families a literacy seminar before the kids each picked out two free books at the book fair. McDougall spoke to the parents about how they can support their children’s reading habits, offering them techniques to engage the kids in the story, even if the parents themselves can’t read English well. Five translators were on hand to help the families select good books for their kids.
McDougall told Lynn Monty of the Burlington Free Press, “These children are all very eager to learn and to read more often, but many of them have few, if any, books of their own at home. Their parents often work multiple jobs which makes it hard to take children to the library, and many of the parents themselves have limited literacy skills.”
“We are newcomers who want to help our kids at home,” Mon Gurung, who moved to the U.S. from Nepal, told Monty.
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Meet the Generous Boy Who Collects Books for Homeless Kids
Six-year-old Blake Ansari has learned a lot about the problems facing poor families and kids from his dad, Nuri Ansari, who works with the homeless. So when he heard that there are about 22,000 homeless kids in New York City (according to the New York Times), he told his mom, Starita Ansari, “That means they don’t have a library,” Sarah Goodyear writes for Atlantic Cities.
Blake began collecting books and gathered 600 volumes, which he donated to a PATH (Prevention, Assistance, and Temporary Housing) shelter in the Bronx. Counselors at PATH plan to give the books to homeless children who come to stay there, and the kids will be able to keep the books.
Starita told Goodyear she hopes Blake’s book quest raises awareness of the problem of homeless children throughout the United States, who numbered 1,168,354 in the U.S. Department of Education’s 2013 study. “When you listen to the community, learn from the community, and help the community, you connect to your best self,” Starita said.
As for Blake, he’s got even bigger plans: He now wants to build a library for homeless kids. If he’s accomplishing all this in first grade, we can’t wait to see what he does next year in second grade.
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Can a Book Make You a Better Person?
Several recent studies have suggested that reading fiction can improve a person’s capacity for empathy, which gave Roman Krznaric, the author of “Empathy: A Handbook for Revolution,” an idea. Why not start an online library filled with books and movies that teach empathy to their readers and viewers?
Krznaric writes on the blog StartEmpathy.Org, “I wanted to create a place where anybody, anywhere in the world, could find the best resources for helping us escape from the narrow confines of our own experiences and enter the realities of different cultures, generations, and lives.”
So he launched the Empathy Library, where users can recommend and rate the books and movies that have moved them and caused them to empathize with other people. It isn’t actually a library where patrons can check out or download books and movies, but rather a resource for people to use if they want to find stories that can help develop empathy. Kznaric quotes British novelist Ian McEwan, who wrote, “Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.”
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The Big Easy’s Big Literacy Challenge
New Orleans has a big goal for its 300th birthday in 2018: Leaders want to make New Orleans the most literate city in America through a program called Turn the Page. The initiative kicked off January 22 with an effort to break the Guinness world record for the largest read-aloud event. About 500 kids attended to hear some of the city’s finest musicians play, including Grammy-winning bandleader Irvin Mayfield, one of the major forces behind the literacy campaign, and New Orleans actor Wendell Pierce, known for his work on “The Wire” and “Treme,” who read aloud from “The Bourbon Street Band is Back.”
The Turn The Page program unites 11 library systems and many media organizations throughout southern Louisiana in a simultaneous effort to improve school readiness among preschoolers, reading ability among school-age kids, digital literacy, and literacy among adults. Last month’s kickoff began a blitz of 30 literacy-encouraging events in 30 days, such as the “Super Bowl of Reading,” through which people vote for their favorite author to be featured at area libraries, individual computer classes to help people get online, and a pajama story time for kids. The Turn the Page website will make literacy tools available.
Central Connecticut State University conducts an annual literacy survey of in cities across America, measuring such factors as educational attainment, the number of booksellers, and the availability of library resources, and ranks cities. Last year New Orleans ranked 25th out of 75. Given all the efforts the people of New Orleans are making to improve literacy, 2013’s number one city, Washington D.C., is going to have to hit the books to hold off New Orleans’ challenge.
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Meet the Incredible 13-Year-Old Who Delivered a Million Books to Kids in Need
Maria Keller loves to read—and she’s determined to share that love with everyone around her. The 13-year-old bookworm founded the nonprofit Read Indeed five years ago with the goal of delivering 1 million books to low-income children before she turned 18. At the halfway point, the organization has already exceeded her ambition, donating 1,032,067 books worth roughly $4 million.
Read Indeed collects donations through book drives and drop-offs offs at the organization’s Plymouth, Minnesota, warehouse, and the books are delivered to schools, hospitals, community centers and churches, according to Women You Should Know. Some of Keller’s favorite books include The Giver, The Help, Hatchet, Treasure Island, Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane and the Harry Potter series. “I love the fact it can kind of take you anywhere and you don’t think about the life outside of reading,” she told MyFox9.
Keller’s next goal is to deliver books to all 50 states and to every country in the world. “You are never too young or too old to make a difference,” she said.
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What Looks Like a Birdhouse and Promotes Literacy?
In 2009, Todd Bol of Hudson, Wisc., had a brilliant idea to honor his mother, a bookworm and retired schoolteacher: He built a small model of a one-room school house, filled it with books, and stuck it on a pole in his yard with a sign that said “Free Books.” His little library became so popular that Bol built more and gave them to people to install in their yards. Eventually he teamed up with Rich Brooks of the University of Wisconsin, who had an idea to turn this effort into something much grander—a way to promote literacy nationwide, give people access to free books in communities where they’re hard to come by, and encourage more reading. They initially set a goal of building 2,509 of these birdhouse-like “Little Free Libraries,” the same number of libraries that Andrew Carnegie supported at the turn of the 19th century. But in the past five years, they’ve far exceeded their hopes. As of this month, Little Free Library counts between 10,000 and 12,000 registered small libraries across the world, with more built every month.
On its website, Little Free Library offers instructions on how to build and maintain libraries using recycled materials, and for the less-handy, it sells libraries that are already built and ready to install.
Every year, more people and organizations become involved in the Little Free Library movement. For example, The United Way of Northwest Georgia recently undertook a project to build and install 25 little libraries, inspired by member Carey Mitchell’s outsized book collection that he wanted to share with others. While Little Free Library warns people not to install libraries in public places without permission, communities throughout northwest Georgia have embraced the idea, and 25 libraries will soon be installed in public parks and areas. Now they’re just looking for a few volunteers to help maintain the libraries, keeping them clean and stocked with books. Especially in towns where bookstores have closed or libraries are distant, these little beacons of literature are welcome additions to the landscape.
This School Cut Textbook Costs from $600 to $150 With One Innovation
At Archbishop Stepinac High School in upstate New York, almost every textbook is now digital and accessible from students’ laptops and tablets. The cost of books has dropped from $600 to $150, and all of the digital textbooks are kept in cloud storage. And more than just migrating traditional content onto a screen, the digital textbooks offer a much richer learning experience. The material is supplemented with videos, assessments, virtual labs and blogging capability. Students can also highlight passages or write notes in the margins without damaging a book for other students. Teachers say that student learning has improved, and homework with the digital texts is more productive, so they can engage students in more discussion and analysis in class. As tablets and computers become less expensive and more online lessons and books become available, either through publishers or through platforms that teachers find or create themselves, more students will benefit from digital textbooks and materials. “It’s all great,” said one Stepinac junior. “As long as the Wi-Fi doesn’t go down.”
A Collaboration to Provide Good Reads to Troops
Press 53, an award-winning small publisher of literary fiction and poetry based in North Carolina, is teaming up with AnySoldier.com to provide good reads to troops. Whenever a book lover buys a book through Press 53’s website between Veteran’s Day and Thanksgiving, Press 53 will send the customer their order and also send a book to an active-duty soldier or a wounded veteran. Sergeant Brian Horn began AnySoldier.com in 2003 when he was stationed in Iraq as a way to distribute care packages to soldiers who don’t get much mail. Press 53 has been sending books to soldiers in the Middle East since 2007, and two years ago began also sending books to the Veterans Writing Project in Washington D.C., which gives the books to soldiers recovering at the Walter Reed Hospital and other rehabilitation centers. Their program is a good way for anyone who loves reading to share that enthusiasm with a soldier.
Sources: Press 53 / AnySoldier.Com