Another thing that will be on our list every year is the Summer Reading Program at the library. The boys love checking out books, writing them down and getting their prizes. This year they were super hero themed bags. Pretty cool and handy!
There are also weekly activities that alternate between a story time and a guest performer. Honestly the story time lady kind of sucks. The books she picks are usually long and not great for a read a loud. Kathleen Kelly she is most definitely NOT! (sidenote: I seriously wish I could be Kathleen Kelly when I grow up. It's a dream that will probably never be realized.) However they are usually really good performers and we've seen some wonderful ones in the past.
The last one of the year was not the best and most experienced, but his story won my heart so we stayed for every second. It's a local man who was at a fundraiser and heard someone speaking about the word gap in lower socioeconomic communities.
This excerpt was taken from an article posted on NPR in 2013
"In the early 1990s, a team of researchers decided to follow about 40 volunteer families — some poor, some middle class, some rich — during the first three years of their new children's lives. Every month, the researchers recorded an hour of sound from the families' homes. Later in the lab, the team listened back and painstakingly tallied up the total number of words spoken in each household.
What they found came to be known as the "word gap."
It turned out, by the age of 3, children born into low-income families heard roughly 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers."
You could argue that there are a lot of other criteria that might enter the picture besides just money but it doesn't really matter to me what the extra reasons could be that go into it, what matters is that its a real thing and upon hearing about it this man decided not to just sit and do nothing. He decided instead to make himself a super hero called Word Man who goes around to libraries, preschools, day cares and other areas with lower income children and tell them stories to help close that word gap.
His heart for this purpose shone through all of his words and his dedication and ambition will be an encouragement to me as I continue to seek God's will for my next steps in my journey onward. The fact that Logan came home singing his theme song was just icing on the cake for me.
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