According to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, all children have a right to a free primary education, and therefore a right to be literate.
Literacy is at the heart of a basic education for all and is essential for eradicating poverty and promoting peace and democracy. The United Nations proclaimed the ten year period beginning January 2003, the United Nations Literacy Decade. September 8th is International Literacy Day.
Your club can promote literacy in your communities and nationally by implementing projects in Kids Care BookShare, such as reading to younger kids and by collecting new and gently used books to give to children in need.
According to First Book, the ratio for age appropriate books in middle income neighborhoods is 13 books to 1 child as opposed to low income neighborhoods where the ratio is 1 book to 300 children. It is important to get books into the hands of the children who do not have them.
There many good reasons to help children learn to read, especially by the third grade. If students do not learn to read by third grade, they will experience great difficulty when challenged to "read to learn" throughout the rest of their education. Statistics reveal that if kids are poor readers in third grade, the majority will be poor readers in the ninth grade. Other sobering statistics are:
- One in four U.S. children grow up not knowing how to read.1
- Two-thirds of students who cannot read proficiently by the end of 4th grade will end up in jail or on welfare.1
- According to Unicef, nearly a billion people will enter the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names and two-thirds of them are women.
Help celebrate International Literacy Day by implementing one of the projects found in Kids Care BookShare.
1 Begintoread.com
Jordyn Schara, a teen leader in Reedsburg, WI created C4C (Comics 4 Change) with the Reedsburg Kids Care Club to try to combat high school dropout rates by improving the reading levels of students at the elementary level.
Her goal is to help engage struggling young readers to develop the critical skills necessary to read more challenging works, including the classics. Jordyn hopes to achieve this goal by hosting comic book fairs at local elementary schools. She is working within her community with several elementary schools and hopes to branch out to her entire school district and then to the whole state of Wisconsin. The profits from the comic book fairs are creating scholarships in the school district for student activities. Reedsburg Kids Care Club's student volunteers are reading to pre-school students and helping elementary school students read.
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