Share a Story ~ Shape a Story 2010 a Blog Tour for Literacy

Welcome to Share a Story-Shape a Future 2010! We had such a wonderful experience with our inaugural blog tour for literacy that we couldn’t resist doing it again.  The Share a Story is OUR blog tour – yours and mine. The name says it all share your story! It is an opportunity to talk about literacy and exchange ideas and tips we can use in our lives. Our goals are to encourage, empower, and, “unplug” and make a difference in our communities. (image: Share a Story Shape a Future logo created by Elizabeth Dulemba)

We selected the theme It Takes a Village to Raise a Reader because this is a job bigger than what a parent, teacher, or librarian can do alone. It takes all of us.  To help illustrate that point, our opening theme today is The Many Faces of Reading. This is a walk around the proverbial village … parents, teachers, librarians, and hopefully you, share ideas on ways to connect kids with books …  (image credit: created by Susan Stephenson using toondoo.com)

Updated: Adding links as they go live.

NEW: Just checking in and not sure where to start? Then head over to Tif Talks Books. Tif has superb summaries of each post ready to help you.

At home

• To kick off our morning Lee Wind starts us off with Dads! He shares the 3 Secrets of Reading with Your Daughter.
• Greg Pincus tells us how sharing a story is the gift of a liftetime at Gotta Book.
• Melissa Taylor offers a win-win-win with parent-child book clubs at Imagination Soup. Don’t tell anyone, but this is the best book club you’ll ever join.  From Melissa: “PS, Oprah, I’ve got one on ya. You forgot the kids.”
• We can’t talk family literacy without Just One More Book . I wrote Andrea Ross a note, thinking she and Mark had done a podcast about reading together, but she reminded me that I was thinking about her article The Family that Reads Together … What’s In It for Me? She wrote this as a guest blogger for the Children’s Book Review.

In School

• Sarah Mulhern will talk about the teacher-student relationship at The Reading Zone. This morning she is talking about social reading.
• NEW: M Dahms talks about the parent-teacher relationship and how they view books and reading in About Readers Workshop: The Faces of Reading at A Reader’s Community blog.
• I am sharing my experience as a volunteer reading tutor here at Scrub-a-Dub-Tub.

In Our Communities

• At Eva’s Book Addiction, Eva Mitnick is going to tell us about the Grandparents and Book Volunteer Program in the Los Angeles Public Library. The “GAB Program” started as a pilot in one library is now in 72 branches of the Los Angeles public library.
• Carol Rasco, President of Reading is Fundamental, talks about the who’s and why’s of community readers in partnerships in Why So Many Faces? at Rasco from RIF.

• NEW: Marge Loch-Wouters celebrates the Frequent Reader Club at Tiny Tips for Library Fun.
• NEW: Think libraries don’t matter? Susan Stephenson explains why you’re dead wrong at The Book Chook blog.

We’d also like to encourage you to head over to read about, vote for, and promote Everybody Wins USA’s National “Read to Kids” campaign. This is a project that brings together all of the stakeholders in the proverbial village. From the proposal: “A national ‘Read to Kids’ campaign could engage national and local literacy organizations, schools, teachers, parents, authors, publishers and nearly every sector of business and society that understands that our nation’s future depends on our children’s literacy skills.”

With that, I’ll leave you to start your walk around town. I am so excited to have the global village coming together for the event. We have bloggers in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom (Ireland and Great Britain), and the United States this year! If you joined us last year, I’m so glad you’ve come back. If this is your first time following the tour, I hope you’ll join in. Each day we have a theme, with a group of bloggers writing about topics related to the theme. Our daily host will link you to her guests, and you can also follow along at the Share a Story blog.

If you’re usually a lurker, be brave and leave a comment at a blog or two. If you have written a post on the topic or are inspired to write a post, be sure to add the link in the comments. New this year we have added daily writing prompts. If you’d like to write something but don’t know what, hopefully these questions will do the trick. Whether you leave the link on the host’s blog or Share a Story, I will add it to the master index throughout the week.

As has been our practice, we will update the direct links to the individual posts as they go live. You can also follow the discussions (or start one!) on Twitter. We’re using the #SAS2010 hashtag.

Welcome … we’re glad you’re here and would love to have you share your story.