June is here! We’re celebrating lots of grant program finales and are gearing up for summer… Summer Readers in particular. Let’s take a breather to catch up on some literacy news.

 

• Just in time for Father’s Day next weekend, here’s the #DadsRead campaign. The campaign, “designed to encourage fathers to read with their kids and celebrate dads who already do so,” was created when the founders realized that in their own lives, and in recent studies, dads read to their children, read for pleasure, and visit the library less frequently than moms.

 

• CLiF works to inspire children to love reading — we don’t participate in teaching children how to read. But literacy skills are essential to school, work, transportation, self-care–elements of an independent, productive life. With that in mind, we cheer the results of this study that show with intensive instruction, children with intellectual disabilities can learn to read independently: “By the end of the four-year study, most of the students with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities could independently read 1st-grade-level text.”

 

• By now you’ve probably heard about LeVar Burton’s wildly successful Kickstarter campaign to bring Reading Rainbow to new media platforms. Another wildly successful Kickstarter campaign? That would be our friend and author/illustrator Marty Kelley’s project to fund A Cape! — a book he decided to self-publish after publishing several books the traditional way. He crushed his goal two days ago.

 

• This year’s nationwide library summer reading program, Fizz, Boom, Read!, celebrates fun and learning with science. Librarians, parents, and anyone involved in summer activities — here’s a great list of science activities to tie to your book list.

 

• Why reading aloud matters: read all about it in Gretchen’s column in Parent Express, the parenting magazine of the Keene Sentinel.

 

• Finally, CLiF is excited to launch our Summer Readers program in a few weeks and reach 3,700 young readers and writers throughout Vermont and New Hampshire. Learn more here.

 

Happy Friday!