Library Grants for Family Literacy

The National Center for Family Literacy has created a national award for libraries that will support and fund libraries’ family programming. “Libraries and literacy have such a natural connection, and we designed the award to help tighten that,” says Emily Kirkpatrick, vice president of the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL), which co-launched the grant with online book site, Better World Books. Use this link to access a form so you’ll be notified of grant criteria and receive an application when available (after October 1.)

Thanks to School Library Journal and Reading Tub’s Literacy Roundup for the news and links.

Cookjoy & Bookjoy

Have you seen the movie “Julie & Julia”? If you like to cook and aren’t a vegetarian, you’ll probably thoroughly enjoy it. I did. I’d just finished Julia Child’s memoir, My Life in France, which moves along happily from meal to meal. It was my reward for sending off my new manuscript tentatively titled, Zing: 7 Creativity Practices for Educators & Their Students, to the editor at Corwin last week. Whew! A book of letters to teachers and librarians, it’s due out in the spring.

In the last letter I have a quote from Julia Child that I found some years ago about her zest for what she did. I found Julia Child an amazing story — a woman who didn’t know how to cook and who, by falling in love with France and French cooking and by her optimistic persistence, shared her cookjoy with America. She worked for years experiencing many set-backs, but she’d dust her ego off and continue. Paul, her supportive husband gets a gold star too. Julia Child is a high-spirited, cheerful and hard-working example for those of us excited about sharing bookjoy.

Share Bookjoy!