We congratulate U. S. Senator Roger F. Wicker and U. S. Congressman Rubén Hinojosa who were this year’s recipients of the inaugural Book Champion Award. Thank you for all the work that you do on behalf of children across our nation.

The Dollar General Literacy Foundation was this year’s recipient of the Legacy of Literacy Award. Accepting on behalf of the foundation was Greg Sparks, Dollar General Literacy Foundation board member and executive vice president of store operations. For over a decade, RIF has been extremely fortunate to have the support of the Dollar General Literacy Foundation — one of our most consistent and enthusiastic funding partners.

We’d also like to thank our Anne Hazard Richardson Volunteer of the Year Award recipients who donate their time, talents and energy to motivate children to read. From left to right, RIF president and CEO, Carol H. Rasco, awardees Maira Burns, Dr. Wanda Dawson, Ellen Halliday and Justina Johnson Head along with RIF board chairman, Jack Remondi.

In addition, we’d like to thank Kelly Bingham and Paul O. Zelinsky for their wonderful rendition of the Z Is for Moose story. Their fun and irreverent humor was a wonderful way to end the evening and leave us wanting more.

We hope to see you back again next year as RIF celebrates its 50th anniversary!

P is for Pictures! Click here to see photos from this year’s gala celebration.

by Nikolas Baron at Grammarly.com

Five Ways to Make Grammar Fun for Kids

They don’t call it “grammar school” for nothing. Learning grammar—those pesky parts of speech, irregular verbs, even word order and punctuation marks—is an essential part of education.

Even though it’s a vital skill to master, it’s sometimes hard to get kids excited about learning grammar.

Grammarly has been developing good grammar-checking software for academic and professional settings. Through their research, understanding, and experience, here are our five recommendations for making grammar education a little less painful and maybe even—gasp!—fun.

Keep It Real
Bring grammar into the real world by incorporating text from magazines, blogs, popular books, graphic novels, cartoons, and even song lyrics. If examples from textbooks are often dry and out of touch with the interests and problems of modern kids, look instead to see if you can find the subject or the verb of the first line of a favorite song or tweet. How about identifying the adjectives that describe a favorite cartoon character? Use examples from graphic novels to look for differences among, say, the “its” family: it’s or its. Grammar and grammatical applications are all around us!

Play with Words
Grammar doesn’t have to be serious. Encourage your young learners to experiment with puns and other wordplay, writing their own silly stories, and playing with Mad Libs-style fill-in-the-blank games. “All this is play in the sense that it is free of the burden of the reader’s final judgment, but it helps students gain fluency, flexibility, and precision,” says Brock Haussamen, author of Grammar Alive!

Bite-Sized Pieces
Try breaking grammar instruction into mini-lessons that tackle one rule at a time. We’re fond of the “Let’s eat Grandma!” meme that teaches the importance of comma placement in direct address and items in a series. The idea is to master one small grammatical point—for example, misplaced modifiers—preferably using memorable examples like this classic: “This morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas.” Have some fun with that one and then move on to another mini-lesson.

Make It a Game
Gamification is the technique of applying the principles that make games addictive to other activities. You can turn learning into a game by devising your own “level up” and rewards system (perhaps based on the mini-lessons above), or you can check out one of these games. Play on!

Start with the Concrete
Little children naturally progress from concrete to more abstract. When babies learn to talk, their first words are typically words they can see or do: baby, bottle, doggy, Mama, Dada. So follow this natural example from speech: start with things children can see (nouns) and do (verbs). Add from there. What colors are the things children see? How many? What kind? Those three questions produce adjectives! No need to make children cry by beginning with the differences among the two/to/too family yet. Start with the concrete and build from there to include traditional grammar as a part of learning!

What are your tips for teaching grammar to kids? Share your thoughts in the comments!

by Nikolas Baron

Bio:
Nikolas discovered his love for the written word in elementary school, where he started spending his afternoons sprawled across the living room floor devouring one Marc Brown children’s novel after the other and writing short stories about daring pirate adventures. After acquiring some experience in various marketing, business development, and hiring roles at Internet startups in a few different countries, he decided to re-unite his professional life with his childhood passions by joining Grammarly’s marketing team in San Francisco. He has the pleasure of being tasked with talking to writers, bloggers, teachers, and others about how they use Grammarly’s online proofreading application to improve their writing. His free time is spent biking, traveling, and reading.

Whether you’ll be joining us next month in Washington, D.C. at RIF’s 2014 Cat in the Hat Gala or not, you can already get in on the fun — our gala auction is now open! Register online and bid on one-of-a-kind items today.

RIF’s auction is known for the original artwork created and donated by well-known children’s illustrators. Illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi worked with his six-year-old daughter, Sophia, to create his original painting for this year’s gala. See their process below, and their mention in last week’s Publishers Weekly.

This year, you can also bid on unique experiences and vacations, sports memorabilia, and rare, collectible Dr. Seuss artwork. Click to see all the fantastic items we have for you this year. Bidding will remain open until 8:30pm on April 24, the evening of the gala, and winners will be posted on our website the following day. Happy bidding, Book People!

We hope you’re as excited as we are for RIF’s 2014 Cat in the Hat Gala! Today, we had an extra special treat when the CAT IN THE HAT visited our office in person to draw the winners of our photo contest!

Watch the video to see who won, then check out some of our favorite photo submissions from RIF coordinators across the country.

NBC Today Show anchors Natalie Morales and Willie Geist deliver the results of a new survey from Reading Is Fundamental and Macy’s. The anchors also talk about their experiences reading with their own children, with Natalie Morales treating viewers to her special version of ‘Goodnight Moon.’ Trouble with the video? Watch it on today.com

The numbers are in — only one in three parents reads bedtime stories to their child each night.

Despite all we know, few parents with kids age eight and younger are engaged in nightly reading, according to the new survey from Reading Is Fundamental (RIF) and Macy’s. The survey, conducted by Harris Interactive, finds that only one in three parents (33 percent) read bedtime stories with their children every night, and 50 percent of parents say their children spend more time with TV or video games than with books.

Join us to keep bedtime stories alive! This marks the 10th year of our partnership with Macy’s, and we stand poised to deliver our 10 millionth book to children in need nationwide this summer.

Help us get more books to more children in need. From June 21 to July 21, visit your local Macy’s store to participate in our Be Book Smart campaign. Customers coast-to-coast can give $3 at any Macy’s register in-store to help provide a book for a child in their local community. Macy’s will donate the full amount to RIF, and customers will receive a coupon for $10 off an in-store purchase of $50 or more. Last year, Macy’s helped to raise $4.8 million for RIF, providing 1.6 million books to children in need.

  Bedtime Stories Infographic by Reading Is Fundamental