Books for Kids

As a kid, borrowing books from a library is wonderful; owning your own books is even better.

The Buffalo News has a story about a successful program in Western NY called Books for Kids (the program extends throughout the state).

Columnist Margaret Sullivan writes: “Two of the best possible gifts for children, I’m convinced, are the love of reading and the presence of books in the home. This is true now, in the Internet Age, every bit as much as it was in the 1970s when I got to know “Hamlet” and “Macbeth” [the author was given a four-volume Collected Works of Shakespeare as a teenager].

In fact, it may be more valuable now than ever, since reading develops a child’s attention span, balancing the effects of the fast-flickering digital world that 21st century children increasingly live in. Seeing my own children — both teenagers now — reading for pleasure has been one of the great satisfactions of motherhood for me. That’s because I know it has helped them, making them better students, more informed citizens and more interesting people. “