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Today’s guest blogger, Sarah Kilway, wrote to us after receiving hundreds of new books for her students. We couldn’t resist sharing her story with you.

I teach 187 kids at Ben Davis Ninth Grade Center in Indianapolis, IN. The majority of my students live in poverty. Most have only one parent at home.

Not many of my kids own books, nor were they read to as children. Even as 9th graders, they lack basic common knowledge of fairy tales, fables and iconic book characters.

Our school has many great resources, but when something is lacking, my colleagues and I step in. This often means spending my own money on books and other items for my students, but it’s totally worth it. I also have First Book.

Thanks to First Book, I was recently able to give a new book to every single one of my students – all 187! A few told me it was the first book they’d ever owned. Some said it was the first book they have ever finished. Such a proud moment for me and them – one that I wanted to share with you.

My students now ask me to go to the library on a daily basis.

Please give to First Book today so I can continue helping them discover and enjoy reading, and so other teachers can too. Your support puts a whole new world within their reach.

The post 187 Reasons Why a Teacher Needs Books appeared first on First Book Blog.

I have been signed up with First Book for several years. I teach kindergarten and first grade at Dayton Public Schools in the poverty-stricken inner city of Dayton, Ohio. I get plenty of emails from First Book, but have never received one book. Most books seem to be located in a warehouse in a large metropolitan area. You would have to drive a truck through states to get there.

– Mary Reed
Dayton Public Schools

Hi Mary,

It sounds like you signed up with First Book to get new books for your students, but we haven’t been able to help you make that happen yet. Let’s fix that.

There are actually two different ways you can get books from First Book.

The First Book Marketplace: Over 5,000 popular and award-winning titles, from board books to college prep, available exclusively to educators serving kids in need. This channel is great for teachers like you, who often need specific titles for their students.

The First Book National Book Bank: The nation’s only clearinghouse for large-scale book donations from publishers. These brand-new books are available free of charge (plus a shipping & handling fee), in carton quantities, and are perfect for educators or program leaders who want to help children start home libraries of their own.

Books from the The First Book Marketplace are available 24 hours a day, while books from the The First Book National Book Bank are available as new donations come in, usually once a month.

When we receive new books from publishers for the National Book Bank, they’re sent to a (borrowed) warehouse and we ship them out to everyone who requested books. We try to hold these local book distributions in different cities around the country, which helps people who can’t afford even the shipping charges.

But you don’t have to wait until there’s a book distribution near you. Once you’re sign up with First Book, you’re eligible for free books from every single distribution, whether the warehouse is in San Diego or Boston.

So the next time you get an email letting you know about a book distribution, check out the title list and let us know which books your kids will love and we’ll do everything we can to help you get them.

And we’ll put Dayton on our list of cities to visit someday soon.

Thanks for writing!

The post We’re Coming to Your Town Someday… But It Doesn’t Matter appeared first on First Book Blog.

Is there a teacher in your life who works with kids in need?

First Book needs your help in connecting 5,000 new teachers, librarians, reading specialists and school administrators with brand new books and resources for back-to-school.

Anyone working at a Title I school is eligible to sign up now with First Book (or any program serving kids in need; it doesn’t have to be a school).

Once they’re signed up, they’ll:

1) have access to the First Book Marketplace, where they can find over 4,000 titles, including books for reluctant readers, Common Core resources, Caldecott and Newbery award-winners and graphic novels.

2) receive regular email updates about new, free books donated by publishers and available through the First Book National Book Bank.

Encourage the educators in your life to sign up today at firstbook.org/join.

Or share this message via the social media buttons below.

The post Help Your Favorite Teacher Get New Books for Back-to-School appeared first on First Book Blog.

Our guest bloggers today are students from Holy Family Catholic School located in Toronto, Canada. Holy Family is an elementary school that recently signed up with First Book Canada, and they’ve already received over 1,000 books for their small school.

Forget the electronic games, nothing beats spending time with a fun book. That’s what the students at Holy Family Catholic School discovered when First Book Canada donated a variety of exciting books to the students of the school.

“I like the books I got because the topics were interesting,” said Daniel, a third-grade student at Holy Family. “My books were Traitor’s Gate, Ancient Rome and Medieval Times. These books are my favourites. Thank you First Book Canada, I hope you will send more cool books to us.”

The books included fiction as well as nonfiction catering to readers of various reading levels and ages.  The older students at Holy Family shared in the joy of reading and were similarly appreciative.

“First Book Canada has given kids around Canada an opportunity to read different books on different topics,” said Micah, a sixth-grade student. “Every book tells a story. Even kids from JK were given a chance to get a head start on reading. Most importantly, First Book Canada has let us learn information we never knew before. Thank you for giving our school a chance to turn the TV off and open a book.”

The post Students at Holy Family Catholic School Receive Over 1,000 Books appeared first on First Book Blog.

Hey! Do you work with kids in need? If so, then we have thousands of brand-new books for you!

Spanish, English and even bilingual titles for kids ranging from ages 4-18 are now available through First Book.

If you’re looking for fun and creative ways to teach Spanish to the children in your classroom or program, we have arts and coloring books that come with crayons and glitter pens. Many more Spanish titles are also available, including books from the Phineas & Ferb collection.

We also have bilingual titles that showcase familiar Disney characters while teaching vocabulary – examples include The Lion King: Movement and Cars: Colors, and an assortment of English titles to choose from such as Disney Nursery Rhymes & Fairy Tales and several books from the popular Blue Blood teen series.

These titles and more are available now! To get these books for free, sign up withFirst Book today. The books are available through First Book’s National Book Bank program; we take large-scale donations from the publishing industry and distribute them to the schools and programs in our national network.

We are excited to offer so many new Spanish and bilingual titles and hope you will not miss out on this great new selection of books!

The First Book team just got back from Brattleboro, Vermont, where we distributed 350,000 brand-new books to kids in need. About 100,000 of those books went to local teachers and community leaders, and the rest were shipped out to schools and programs serving kids from low-income families across the country.

The books were donated by our friends at Disney Publishing Worldwide, and included quite a few fairy and princess titles.

“There were four of us, and we worked, worked, and worked,” said Katie Niersbach, who led the team in Vermont. “Fairy books are HEAVY.”

The distribution was made possible thanks to the support of the Vermont Foodbank, who provided warehouse space and volunteers, and also received a large number of books to distribute to the children served by their centers throughout the state.

Also richly-deserving of our thanks is Carolyn Appleton, a Vermont teacher and community activist who signed up over 80 new programs to help them get books from First Book and fed our staff and volunteers ice cream. (She’s also the mother of one of our staffers, but that only makes us love her more.)

So a big ‘thank you’ to Carolyn and to all our friends at Disney and the Vermont Foodbank, and an even bigger thanks to all the educators – in Vermont and everywhere else – who go the extra mile every day to turn their kids into readers.

Recently, First Book promised to distribute one million brand-new books to kids in need across the country in just ten days.

Those ten days are up, and we are as good as our word. Better, even … altogether we distributed a little over 1.2 million books to the schools and programs in our national network. Woot!

25,000 of those books went to kids at Title I schools across Montana. Heather Denny, a Title I specialist in Montana who was instrumental in helping First Book distribute the books at a statewide conference of Title I teachers, emailed us this morning to tell us how excited her colleagues were.

“It was amazing!” she wrote. “You should have seen the smiles on our teacher’s faces. We had a retiring teacher who worked in the book room all day because she wanted to see the young teachers coming in and leaving with boxes of books.”

If that doesn’t warm your heart, you are made of sterner stuff than we are.

Thanks to everyone who made this possible, from the hard-working volunteers who spent long, tiring days in warehouses to the generous publishers who provided the books to our nonprofit and corporate partners who provide the support needed, and especially to all the teachers and local program leaders who take these books and use them to turn kids into readers.

Want to get involved in our next amazing book distribution? Click here to sign up for our newsletter and we’ll send you monthly emails sharing stories and letting you know how you can get involved in your community.

Yesterday we went to Nashville and picked up 50 cases of books for our organization that serves special needs and will be delivering them tomorrow at our basketball signups.

This is going to be such an amazing thing for these special children and I can’t wait to see the smiles on their faces when they get an early Christmas present of these wonderful books.

Rick Ryan
Challenged Athletes Playing Equally (C.A.P.E.)
Murfreesboro, TN
www.capetn.org

I just can’t believe all the books I got this morning!!!  I do believe I got everything I asked for and more. We know that doesn’t often happen in this game of life.   I’ve gotten books before, but never like  this.  I thank you for offering this opportunity and look forward to some great book clubs and organizing a book give away with our kids at Warner.  We’d love to have you back in Nashville anytime!

On behalf of the students and teachers at Warner….thanks so much!
 
Mona Bruey
Library Media Specialist
Warner Enhanced Option School
Nashville, Tenn.

One of the ways First Book gets new books into the hands of children from low-income families is through the National Book Bank. Publishers donate new books to First Book, and we distribute them to schools and programs around the country.

Our publishing partners have been even more generous than usual lately, so our National Book Bank team is working overtime, traveling to donated warehouse spaces from coast to coast.

Book distributions are one of our favorite things – we get to meet the teachers and program leaders, hear about the kids they work with, and load up their cars (and trucks and school-buses and even horse trailers) with boxes of new books.

But they are exhausting – a week of 12-hour days spent moving more boxes than you can imagine. Our staff and volunteers give it their all, especially our National Book Bank managers, Katie and Anna, who are in Nashville and St. Joseph, Mo. this week, and traveling (without so much as a day off) to St. Louis and Casa Grande, Ariz.

So thank you to all the amazing local volunteers that show up at warehouses to help get these books to where they need to go, and thank you to all the hard-working educators and community leaders who make sure every book gets into the hands of a child who will take it home and read it again and again.

PS – If you’re on Twitter, drop Anna (@AnnaInTheCity) and Katie (@IAmNotNancy) a note and tell them to keep up the good work!

The end of the year is approaching fast, and that means First Book gets lots of great, high-quality book donations from the many wonderful publishers we work with. Which is terrific; we love books. But when we have this many new books, we need some help getting the word out.

There are a lot of people working with a lot of kids in our national network of 27,000 local schools and programs. But a million books is a LOT of books.

So we’d love to meet some more local schools and programs. If you know a teacher or program leader who works with kids from low-income families, tell them about First Book! You can send them to firstbook.org, or just forward this blog post.

All they have to do is sign up (it’s free, online and only takes a few minutes) and they can apply for all kinds of great books for their kids. Free! (Well, not completely free. There is a 35 cent shipping and handling cost per book, but we try to move these distributions around the country as much as possible so programs who can’t even afford that minimal cost can avoid it by picking up the books in person. Between now and the end of the year, we’ll be visiting Nashville, St. Joseph, Mo., St. Louis, and Casa Grande, Ariz.)

What’s the catch, you ask? THERE IS NO CATCH. First Book is a nonprofit with the mission of getting new books to kids that need them. This is our thing.

To recap:

• Books.
• Lots of them.
• There is no catch.
• Sign up today at firstbook.org.

Click here to learn more about First Book and our National Book Bank program.