Although balancing busy schedules and family lives, celebrities often take time out to make appearances in support of their favorite social issues. Some represent child abuse, others, the environment, and some, politics. Today we’ll look at a few who have used their celebrity to support literacy. Jackie Joyner-Kersey and Ben Vereen were joined by Franklin the Turtle on the morning of September 8th, 2000, a day that had been set aside to celebrate International Literacy Day. (If you look really closely at this picture, you can almost see them.) Over 300 children and parents were present at this Massachusetts gathering. … Continue reading →

According to the National Center for Literacy, children from lower income families will have, by the time they turn four, heard 32 million fewer words than children who were born into professional families. I don’t know how they arrived at that statistic, whether they followed these children around with a calculator, but the finding is pretty significant, regardless of how it was obtained. Another statistic from the same source says that one in five children under the age of five here in America lives in poverty. This lessens their access to proper education, books of their own, transportation to libraries, … Continue reading →