COMING SOON FROM YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY... FAMILY LITERACY!

We librarians sometimes like to imagine that everyone is highly literate and loves words as much as we do. But within our cities, suburbs, and rural areas are children who don’t grow up wanting to read books and parents who don’t understand the implicit and awesome value of words when spoken or read to their children. These are the families for which the decades-young term “family literacy ” has been created. Through my mother’s eyes, family literacy meant the way our family sat together in the same room, each reading his or her favorite newspaper, book, or comic. It meant the way my parents read to me, showed me how to print, helped me find the hidden pictures in Highlights, and regularly took me to the library to search for books. It meant the way my mother pointe