Be A Part Of Something Special Today

The picture here is me and my son, Grant, watching Game 6 of the World Series this week. We were pulling for Boston but weren’t just couch potato-ing like many probably were Wednesday night. We were practicing scoring a baseball game.

Being a good baseball scorekeeper is something of a bit of pride for me. I never made it as an athlete, but I was one of the 4-5 official scorekeepers for the Birmingham Barons AA baseball team for four years. Being a baseball fan and enthusiast, I firmly believe that I’d be a horrible parent if I didn’t teach my children — Katie, age 5, is next — to keep score properly.

Would you believe that Wednesday night’s father-son baseball watching extracurricular is actually a part of our family literacy? No, you don’t need baseball scorekeeping to survive in the world, but it’s the activity of parent and child interacting in the environment of learning that drives family literacy.

Today is National Family Literacy Day and I’m personally trying to raise $10,000 to support the National Center for Family Literacy‘s Big Give. The monies raised today go to supper the NCFL which connects parents with children, parents with grandparents and grandparents with children in ways you probably never thought would drive literacy.

You’ve likely heard me brag on Wonderopolis, a fantastic blog and discovery mechanism for you to sit down and explore with your child. It’s programming is so good, teachers use it for lesson planning in school and drive entire weeks worth of content around its topics. That program is supported by the NCFL.

Perhaps you’ve seen or heard of immigrant older generations or Native American elders learning to read and write with their grandchildren. Those programs are driven by the NCFL.

Perhaps you’d like to see more technology literacy in schools, libraries and education centers around the country. The NCFL fuels programs that do just that.

Yes, I am on the NCFL’s Board of Directors. I am proud to serve because I fundamentally believe that solving literacy is the first domino in solving every other major societal crisis and woe we have. With a more functionally literate society — reading, writing, math, science, technology and more — we have the foundation needed to tackle all the world’s problems.

I’m calling my fundraiser, Books In Hands, Kids In Laps. It tells the story of family literacy to me. Being with and engaged with your children, in the moment, helping them learn and discover the world and its inner workings. This shouldn’t be a privilege of every child or parent. It should be a right.

I need your help to reach my personal goal of $10,000 raised. By my math, if every single Twitter follower I have gives $25, we’ll raise $2,000,000 dollars. If every person I’m connected to in Facebook gives $25, we’ll raise over $42,000.

All I want to raise is $10,000. (But certainly, let’s do more if we can!)

Jump over to my donation page and give what you can. It’s important to help those without, become those with. And it’s the biggest without we can be without: Knowledge.

Thank you for donating.

For more from my network on Family Literacy, I started two interesting Facebook threads worth reading and participating in. Check them out:

Here

and

Here