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Leigh Turina is Lead Librarian for the IBBY Collection for Young People with Disabilities, which is held at Toronto Public Library in … Continue reading ... →

Rockefeller Productions is hosting a special performance of its upcoming new puppet show adaptation of Eric Carle’s children’s books as a benefit.

The event, which will take place on February 19th at the 47^th Street Theatre at 11:00am in New York, will benefit the art and literacy programs at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Massachusetts. The tickets for the benefit cost $75, and include a gift bag, as well as a meeting with a puppet.

The show is based on four of Eric Carle’s stories including: The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse; Mister Seahorse; The Very Lonely Firefly; and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. It premiered in January 2015 in Sydney, Australia and is on continuous tour through 2017 in Australia and New Zealand. The show opens in New York on January 30th.

Well, had this post just about wrapped up when the whole computer crashed on me.  Viva la internet!  Let’s see if I can recover what I lost.

First off, the best thing in the world.  Best.  The world.  Ever.

He is, for the record, on Twitter now.  I’m a bit reluctant to tell you this since I like being one of his few followers.  Ah well.  It was there that I discovered this video as well.  Oh, Huffington Post.  You knew not what you wrought.

Bet Angelina Jolie looks positively easy in comparison now, eh?  Geez, he’s good.

Meanwhile, also at BEA, we had other authors singing.  Michael Buckley brings us Lionel Ritchie while Gareth Hinds, Phil Bildner, and Tom Angleberger juggle behind him at the BEA silent auction.  Not so silent now!!

Thanks to Alvina Ling for the link.

Switching gear away from singing (but focusing just as much on white men standing in front of crowds doing things) this was taken in Australia.  It’s at a bus depot where a lot of preachers have a tendency to stand on milk crates.  Or, in this case, read from the true word of caterpillars.s

Five Hail Marys and four ripe red strawberries.  Thanks to Marci for the link.

Well good one, America.  I hope you’re happy now.  You just made LeVar Burton cry.

By the way – the folks getting upset about this?  Do we truly have nothing else to be upset about?  Let the blooming Rainbow have its day.

Now, of course, that every Kickstarter gets this kind of support.  Case in point, Literary Lots.  The idea?  “Literary Lots will transform 2 vacant lots near inner-city libraries into four-week literary spaces for children in Cleveland. Working together with local artists around themes from specific children’s books, we will re-create places, concepts, and images from these books…”  Nicely done.  The video is a bit off on its year (it says 2013 by accident) but the idea is still a nice one.

Thanks to Pink Me for the link.

In other news, ALA recently released a controversial movie it produced (?!) back in 1977 called The Speaker.  They’ll be showing it at the upcoming ALA Conference in Vegas as well.  Why the controversy?  Well, as their press release put it:

The film depicts a high school Current Events club that decides to invite a white supremacist professor from a local college to address the student body and the controversy that ensues. It was intended for schools, libraries and other organizations to encourage them to discuss the true meaning of the freedom of expression, particularly regarding “tolerance for ideas we detest.”  Many ALA members objected to the film’s subject matter and the process by which the film was produced.  After contentious debate at the 1977 Annual Conference, multiple ALA bodies voted down proposals to remove the organization’s name from the film.

So in case you’ve 42 minutes to spare . . .

And finally, for our off-topic video, the bloody thing that crashed my computer in the first place.  And you know what?  Worth it.  Check out what happens when you sing an 800-year-old Icelandic hymn in a German train station.

This piece also appears on The Huffington Post’s Impact blog.

Steve White, a volunteer at a local nonprofit, worked through the holidays to ensure that 3,000 kids in need in Denver would have brand-new books of their own at Christmas.

Elisa Mayo, the finance coordinator for a school district in Mississippi, helped students at her Title I school get the books — and the encouragement — they needed to start book clubs, and now dozens of students, from third to fifth grade, voluntarily skip recess to meet and to talk about their new books.

A community group in Navajo County, Arizona was so determined to have a free library for local children that they raised money through bake sales, started with a donated room in a nearby gas station, and eventually came up with the funds to build a library.

These everyday heroes all have something in common. They are part of First Book, a nonprofit network of teachers, librarians, community leaders and program administrators serving kids in need — a network that stretches across the country and around the world.

These men and women and thousands more like them are working every day to transform the lives of children from poor neighborhoods, and they know how desperate the need is. Kids from low-income families lack the resources that many of their middle and upper-class peers take for granted. Every study confirms the impact that has on their futures. One study that never fails to shock revealed that, while children in affluent neighborhoods had access to an average of 13 books a day, there is only a single age-appropriate book for every 300 children.

First Book is working to change that. We partner with the publishing industry to provide books — brand-new, high-quality books — to the teachers and program leaders who sign up with us. Our network is the fastest-growing group of educators in the country serving kids in need: we just reached the incredible milestone of 100,000 registered schools and programs.

Reaching that milestone is exciting, because that means that we’re reaching more children in need than ever.

But there’s another reason why bringing so many educators together matters.

By joining First Book, the people we serve are acknowledging something important: we have more power collectively than we do as individuals. It’s one of the most powerful ideas in human history, from the birth of cities to the workers’ unions that built the country to the marvelous online social networks that are transforming how we communicate.

We’ve already seen the impact this can have. For example, at one point, there was no bilingual edition (English and Spanish together) of the perennial children’s classic, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, but the educators we work with requested it repeatedly. Based on that feedback, we were able to go to the publisher and show that there was real demand. A bilingual edition rolled off the presses shortly thereafter, a book now available to all children and families.

This unprecedented network is also the source of valuable insight into the needs of those serving children at the base of the economic pyramid. There is no group of people whose voices are more critical to our collective future; what they have to say about the 30 million children living in low-income families in the United States and their futures is of paramount importance to us all.

Everyone at First Book is proud of our role in supporting this network. But we know there’s much, much more to be done. We estimate that there are 1.3 million educators and program leaders out there eligible to join us, and we’re doing everything we can to connect every single one.

The post The Collective Power of a Nation of Readers appeared first on First Book Blog.