LitWorld, a New York-based organization that advocates for Global Literacy, is organizing a holiday book drive in connection with the International Book Bank to send books to children in Liberia and Sierra Leone, where one book is shared among 75 children, on average, and where some children have never seen, much less owned a book in their life.

Click here to find out where books can be dropped-off or sent to, as well as more information about LitWorld, The International Book Bank and the situation in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

We encourage you to support this worthwhile effort to give words wings. You can keep up with LitWorld’s news and book drive updates via Facebook and Twitter.

Geeta Dharmarajan is the Founder and Executive Director of Katha, an Indian non-profit organization working in the areas of formal and non-formal education, publishing and pro-poor activities. Read my interview with her to find out how since 1988 Katha has been helping children grow up to be India’s reader-leaders. The breadth and depth of their work is remarkable and awe-inspiring!

In case you haven’t heard, Katha was nominated by PaperTigers for the 2011 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, in the category “Promoter of Reading”.

Girls living in poverty are uniquely capable of creating a better future. But when a girl reaches adolescence, she comes to a crossroads:

The Girl Effect is about girls. And boys. And moms and dads and villages and towns and countries. And we can help.

It is common knowledge that children who attend school have a better chance of developing into their full potential and bringing about change in their communities. It’s hard to believe that, in this day and age, so many of the world’s children still aren’t given the opportunity of an education.

Dedicated to “all children who dream of going to school”, Going to School in India is a celebration of what school can be and mean to children. It shows and tells about all kinds of kids—from street kids to kids who go to government and community schools—and how they “climb into school buses, sit on each other’s laps in cycle rickshaws, walk along the edges of mountains, cross scorching deserts on rickety bicycles, swing across rivers on dangling swings-just to get to school.” A festive celebration of formal and informal school settings in India—and of the ways children get to them—this book also reminds us that, while millions of children do get to go to school each day, millions of others don’t.

Published by Shakti for Children (now Global Fund for Children Books) in partnership with Charlesbridge, Going to School in India (2005) is written by Lisa Heydlauff, with photos by Nitin Upadhye, and designed by B.M. Kamath. Royalties from the sale of the book support educational initiatives in India. Click here to learn more about author Lisa Heydlauff’s projects and her Going to School non-profit.

On a related note, in her 2009 interview for PaperTigers, Maya Ajmera, founder and president of the Global Fund for Children talked about the “moment of obligation” she experienced, over 20 years ago, when she stepped out onto a bustling train platform in India and came across an open-air classroom where children were being taught how to read and write—a moment that led her to start The Global Fund for Children. This anecdote illustrates what our Pacific Rim Voices executive director, Peter Coughlan, loves to say: “A ripple can become a tidal wave, an acorn an oak tree.” GFC nowadays reaches millions of children and youth around the world, and supports hundreds of educational projects, including mobile boat schools for children in Bangladesh, night classes for women and girls in the red light districts of India, and countless more.

A ripple can indeed turn into a tidal wave of goodness.

Today is International Literacy Day, and this year the theme is “Literacy and Women’s Empowerment”—a reminder to us all of the need for increased commitment to literacy, especially for girls and women. This theme reinforces and adds a particular focus to the United Nation’s Literacy Decade efforts to encourage a world-wide commitment to issues of literacy.

One of the multitude of events happening around the world in celebration of the day is the award ceremony for UNESCO 2010 International Literacy Prizes, which recognize innovative approaches to literacy education and is taking place at the organization’s headquarters, in Paris. UNESCO King Sejong Literacy Prize, sponsored by the Republic of Korea, will be given to projects in Cape Verde and Germany, and programs in Nepal and Egypt will be receiving the UNESCO Confucius Prize for Literacy, supported by the People’s Republic of China. You can find the complete list of winning projects and honorable mentions here.

Also happening today, following the awards ceremony, is the launch of a very welcome and potentially transformative initiative: the Knowledge and Innovations Network for Literacy (KINL). Created with support from Verizon Foundation and Microsoft, the Network, which will be operational beginning November 1, will work as a virtual workplace where literacy researchers and practitioners can share knowledge and debate literacy topics online, with the goal of generating new ideas and practices.

Let us know how you are celebrating the day at your school, library or household. And keep in mind that, in the US, one way you can show your support for the right to literacy is by signing this declaration. Before delivering it to President Obama, ProLiteracy is sending the declaration scroll around the country to gather signatures from individuals and mayors.

We all deserve a world in which children and adults have the literacy skills they need to lead happy, productive and fulfilling lives, so let’s each do our part—and every little bit counts!— to promote literacy.

You can find PaperTigers’ archived Literacy issue here. To see all our literacy-related blog posts, click on the “World Literacy” category, on the sidebar.

On-LineDegrees.org has recently launched a new blog and has just put together a list of 15 Literacy and Reading blogs – we are grateful to have been included, and there are some old friends there too, like The Miss Rumphius Effect and Rasco from RIF. There are also lots of blogs that are new to me and just waiting to be explored – so thank you, OnLineDegrees, for the introduction; I really enjoyed your Imagine Cup: “The World Cup for nerds” post too!…

If you haven’t read our recent interview with Métis author David Bouchard yet, then head on over there right away! In the interview we talked only a little bit about his recent book Seven Sacred Teachings of White Buffalo Calf Woman (More Than Words, 2009), which he co-wrote with Dr Joseph Martin, is stunningly illustrated by Kristy Cameron, and has an accompanying DVD with music by Swampfox, and for which Swampfox created seven flutes out of seven different woods, each in a different key.

David considers Seven Sacred Teachings to be one of his most important works to date. The seven teachings (Humility, Honesty, Respect, Courage, Wisdom, Truth, and Love) are universal to First Nations peoples, and are the strongest link between First Nation, Inuit and Métis communities. Read on to find out more, for in this post David explains in more depth the background to this fascinating and ambitious project, which brought together six languages: English, French, Ojibwe, South Slavey, Bush Cree and Chipewyan.

The Aboriginal people in Canada have had to deal with many negative experiences over the past century and more: but one of the golden, shiny spots from coast to coast in our country is the spirituality that remains intact. If you go into any one of our schools, any school from coast to coast in Canada with Aboriginal kids, you’ll see posters or writings on the walls that refer to these teachings. Different people call them different things. Among the Ojibwe people they’re called the Grandfather Teachings, amongst the Lakota and Dakota people (who used to be called the Sioux), they’re called the teachings of White Buffalo Calf Woman. Among the Dene of the north and their cousins the Navaho in America, they call them the Dene Laws.

But the teachings are very, very (more…)

Susan over at The Book Chook is putting together a Literacy Cook Book and is inviting contributions:

Here is what I would love you to do: sometime in the next two weeks, send me one recipe that is quick and easy to make, so it gives you more time to spend reading, writing or creating.

and there’ll be a special section of recipes for cooking with kids. The finished book will be available in pdf format, along the same lines as The Book Chook’s other regular feature, the wonderful Literacy Lava. Head on over to The Book Chook for full details… and hurry: I only picked up on this today, one week into the two weeks.

Head on over to Uma Krishnaswami’s Writing with a Broken Tusk to see a presentation from Tulika Books called “Multilingual Publishing – Walking the Tightrope” – it’s quite a long read but definitely worth it. Presenting different languages in children’s books is something I’ve been musing for a while – especially after reading Patsy Aldana’s interview with PaperTigers recently, in which she said:

I have always been opposed to the use of bilingual books, however given that Spanish-only books hardly sell at all, I have had to accept that books in Spanish can only reach Latinos if they are bilingual. This goes against everything I believe and know to be true about language instruction, the joy of reading in your mother tongue…

..and also having just read Nancy Bo Flood’s Warriors in the Crossfire, which raises dilemmas of language/writing in a colonial language (look out for our review in our June issue).

This is definitely a topic that needs to be pursued further…

Saturday was the deadline for nominations for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (ALMA) 2011. Having barely caught our breath from this year’s announcement of Kitty Crowther as the ALMA winner for 2010, we found ourselves working right up to the mark to get our nominations submitted in time, but in they are and it’s very exciting to be able to share them with you all now, along with our 500-character nomination statements:

Author and illustrator, Allen Say, whom we also nominated last year (and if you haven’t already, do read our interview with Allen and enjoy our Gallery of his work):

Often drawing on his own background, Allen Say captivates his readers through beautifully honed prose and luminous watercolors. He embraces a striving for happiness with a blend of gentle humor and realism, and touches on many aspects of being human, such as race, migration, disability and age. Even young children can empathize with and find echoes in many of his stories. Say opens young hearts and minds both to new cultures and to their own potential; and his portrayal of the human condition provides a forum for children to recognize their own value and to dream.

Author and illustrator, Grace Lin (and don’t miss our interview with Grace, either, or her two Gallery features here and here; and do visit her blog):

Grace Lin is passionate about writing for children. Her child-centred creativity is filled with energy and imbued with core values such as family, friendship, loyalty and love. Her readers respond to the warmth of her stories, whether founded on reality or imagination, and to the charm of her illustrations, which demonstrate a commitment to unobtrusive detail. Often drawing on her Asian American heritage, and with a gift for interweaving old and contemporary elements in her work, Grace is not afraid to step away from tradition to create new, meaningful narrative for today’s children.

And Katha, a “profit-for-all”organisation based in India:

Katha is an Indian non-profit organization working in the areas of literacy and education. Since 1988, it has been successfully promoting the literacy to literature continuum in urban disadvantaged communities across India. Its multi-faceted school and community-based outreach approach, including reading campaigns, the supporting of pavement schools in slum clusters and the translation and publishing of Indian literature, among other initiatives, are playing an essential role in helping create a more literate, less divisive India.

You can explore Katha further via their website and we are looking forward to featuring them on PaperTigers in the not too distant future.