SWEET ON BOOKS BLOG

PLEDGE TO READ TO A CHILD AND TARGET WILL DONATE!

        In an effort to help with the educational crisis in this country, Target Corporation (or Tarjay, as it is affectionally known around our house) "has announced plans to donate more than $500 million by the end of 2015 to support education, doubling its support to-date, for a total of more than $1 billion. The financial commitment is part of Target’s new reading initiative, Target Read With MeSM, aimed at helping more U.S. children read proficiently by the end of third grade. As part of the initiative, Target also announced a reading pledge, a donation of up to 2 million books to kids in need, and plans for an innovative reading center that will reach communities across the country through a physical and virtual presence."  For the complete press release, click here.

SO what does this have to do with you?  First of all, a little round of applause for Target, a corporation who does a LOT of good.  Second of all, click here to make the plegde to commit to a regular reading schedule with a child.  

Your pledge does two great things:  it reminds you of the importance of READING with your child.  We all get real busy these days, but don't forget to do this OH SO IMPORTANT THING!  We all want success for our kids, and reading is the fastest route to that.  The second thing your pledge will do is enable Target to donate a book to a child in need.  Target partners with the lovely organization First Book in this endeavor.

So what are you waiting for!  Please get pledging!!!!

Read for the Record

There is an amazing national nonprofit organization called Jumpstart.  Jumpstart's mission is to help get books into the hands of children.  Too often, low income children don't have any literacy opportunities before they get into school; meaning they don't have any books and they don't read with anyone!!  So this very worthy organization brings together college students/community volunteers with preschool children for literacy tutoring and mentoring and distribute books to these children.  Studies have shown over and over again early childhood literacy opportunities are very integral to success in school and in life. Here at Sweet on Books, we support anything that gets kids reading!

Tomorrow, October 8th, Jumpstart is hosting an event called Read for the Record Campaign.  They are trying to get more than 1 million children and adults to read the same book on the same day to break their previous Guinness World record of almost 700,000 .  Over the last three years, through this program, Jumpstart has been able to provide over 500,000 books to kids who need them!

Tomorrow they are reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carl.  

Click here to find out more about Read for the Record and pledge to read tomorrow.  And if you can't pledge to read tomorrow, you can go and buy the book at Walmart and the proceeds of the sale of that book will benefit Jumpstart.

Click here to find out more about Jumpstart.