While It Takes Just One person to get a Needle and Thread: Stitching for Literacy ball in motion, imagine what happens when Just One meets another One and another One.

As you know from parts 1 and 2, Karen, from Arctic Needle, collected bookmarks for Mountain View Elementary School, and Marian stepped up, single-handedly stitching seventy Funk & Weber Designs Books are Treasures, Reading is the Key bookmarks so that every graduating fifth grader would have one.

Enter Jane.

Jane is the librarian at Mountain View Elementary School, one of the less-affluent schools in the city of Anchorage. While Jane was thrilled to receive hand-stitched bookmarks and believed they could encourage her students to read, she saw it as the beginning of a bigger opportunity. Wouldn’t it be nice to give the bookmarks to students along with a brand new book?

Literacy statistics report:

• 61 percent of low-income families have no books at all in their homes for their children.
• The only behavior measure that correlates significantly with reading scores is the number of books in the home.
• Children with books at home are eight times more likely to list reading as one of their favorite activities.

Being a librarian, Jane is resourceful. She applied for and got a grant from First Book to purchase brand new books for all the graduating students.

Every fifth grader leaves school this year with a new book, a hand-stitched bookmark, and the knowledge that their community cares, wants them to read, and thinks reading is important.

I love the variety of books offered to the students: nonfiction, fiction, Artemis Fowl, Ella Enchanted, and a craft book! Yes, yes, yes! Crafting is an effective alternative path to literacy, just like puzzles. It fits with the idea of Creative Literacy as explored in the Share a Story Shape a Future 2010 Blog Tour.

How fun is this?! Remember: It Takes Just One.

If you’d like to be One, please contact me. My email address is in the sidebar, you know.