I've got ten minutes to compose this before I'm out the door. I just logged on to my email, and it was full of requests--Giving Tuesday is apparently a Thing.
Which is ironically excellent, since I'll be giving away books ALL DAY. It's the first of what will be ten (at least) days of rampant amazingness. We are descending on an elementary school right here in Bristol, Virginia side, and giving each and every student three brand-new books of their choice.
This joy comes courtesy of a whopping OMG Book Grant from First Book, and also from my wild audacity--when it came time to write the grant, I went big. And they gave big. And now we're going to give big, too.
The school in question earns a C+ grade in national rankings, which puts it squarely in the middle of the Bristol, Virginia, elementary schools. Ninety-eight percent of its students receive free lunch. It's a big old hulk of a building without much charm, but the teachers are doing a great job of educating their students. Yesterday some of them dropped by the room where we were setting up. (Five tables: picture books, early chapter books, nonfiction and graphic novels, two tables of chapter books. It's about 170 titles total. We're heavily in to free choice.) "Wow," one teacher said, "These aren't leftovers. They're good books."
Damn straight. New, shiny, gorgeous. Diverse. Interesting. We've got everything from Noisy Night to Dinosaurs A to Z to the graphic-novel version of Crossover. The Night Diary and The Bridge Home and Power Forward. Happy Hair. Judy B. Jones. All fourteen volumes of Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
283 students. 849 books. It's gonna be a fine, fine day.
Which is ironically excellent, since I'll be giving away books ALL DAY. It's the first of what will be ten (at least) days of rampant amazingness. We are descending on an elementary school right here in Bristol, Virginia side, and giving each and every student three brand-new books of their choice.
This joy comes courtesy of a whopping OMG Book Grant from First Book, and also from my wild audacity--when it came time to write the grant, I went big. And they gave big. And now we're going to give big, too.
The school in question earns a C+ grade in national rankings, which puts it squarely in the middle of the Bristol, Virginia, elementary schools. Ninety-eight percent of its students receive free lunch. It's a big old hulk of a building without much charm, but the teachers are doing a great job of educating their students. Yesterday some of them dropped by the room where we were setting up. (Five tables: picture books, early chapter books, nonfiction and graphic novels, two tables of chapter books. It's about 170 titles total. We're heavily in to free choice.) "Wow," one teacher said, "These aren't leftovers. They're good books."
Damn straight. New, shiny, gorgeous. Diverse. Interesting. We've got everything from Noisy Night to Dinosaurs A to Z to the graphic-novel version of Crossover. The Night Diary and The Bridge Home and Power Forward. Happy Hair. Judy B. Jones. All fourteen volumes of Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
283 students. 849 books. It's gonna be a fine, fine day.
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