Children’s Book Week slated for May 11-17
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- April
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The first celebration of National Children’s Book Week was in 1919. This year’s 90th annual event is being celebrated in schools, libraries, book stores, clubs and wherever books and kids meet.
“Our local libraries provide a wonderful environment and resource for facilitating and encouraging reading,” said Randall Enos, youth sales consultant for the Ramapo Catskill Library System, in a press release about the event.
Rockland’s libraries are part of the system.
“Book week brings us together to talk about books and r ading and, out of our knowledge and love of books, to ut the cause of children’s reading squarely before the whole community and, community by community, across the whole nation,” he said.
The benefits of reading can’t be downplayed, reading experts said.
“It just opens up the world to them. That says it for me in a nutshell,” said Jennifer Siegel, children’s book buyer for Anderson’s Book Shop in Larchmont.
“Oh, you have the parents who come in and say ‘my kids doesn’t read’ and they need a book. I tell them ‘it’s not that they don’t like to read, they just haven’t found a book they like,’” she said.
Having a week set aside each year to focus on children and children’s books is fine, she said, because anything that brings children and books together is a good thing. April happens to be National Poetry Month, and in honor of the genre, schools around the area are introducing their students to poetry.
But she would prefer that people celebrate children’s book week and things like poetry month all the time, not just one week during the year.
This entry was posted
on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 1:26 pm by Randi Weiner.
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