Every Neighborhood Partnership is partnering with the Luis Palau National group to create a six-month series that describes our work in the city. Below is the third post in the series from the Director of Saturday Sports, Brian Semsem.
One of the biggest challenges for low-income families with regard to literacy is the lack of access to books in the household.
61% of low-income families have no books at all in their homes for their children. That includes children and adult books! What we know is that the only measure that correlates significantly with reading scores is the number of books in the home. An analysis of a national dataset of nearly 100,000 United States school children found that access to printed materials—not poverty—is the “critical variable affecting reading acquisition.”
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss
Wouldn’t you love to be a part of a child’s path to reading?
ENP is on a mission to establish 30 new classrooms with Literacy Mentors this semester, opening more doors for volunteers to help students develop critical reading skills, and most importantly, a love for books and learning.
Would you consider being a part of our “For The Love of Literacy” campaign?
We gathered on Saturday, January 6th to celebrate our Literacy Mentors and kick off the new semester.
It’s a season of thankfulness and giving – a great time to bless the staff at your partnership school!
Several of our partnership churches find ways to regularly bless the teachers and staff. This blessing can be as simple as coffee, tea, donuts and fruit. Gestures like this can brighten a teacher’s busy morning in amazing ways.
I have been working on a blog about Play for some time now. However, I hadn’t been able to narrow my focus well enough to share some of the things I have come to know about play in a concise and effective way. That being said, my intent is to simply share bits and pieces of the things that I have come to know about play. I’ll begin with an attempt to answer this question: “What is play exactly, anyway?”.
Every Neighborhood Partnership constantly works to build support for our local elementary schools. When launched in 2008, our primary goal was to partner a church with every elementary school in Fresno and Clovis. We knew that churches had the capacity to truly make a difference with our kids, school staffs and families. This has proven true.
Yet, we soon realized that there were other stakeholders in our community that could add even more support to both our schools and neighborhoods.
This post first appeared on CareLeader.org, October 11, 2017, here.
We interviewed Mike Tenbusch, author of The Jonathan Effect: Helping Kids and Schools Win the Battle Against Poverty. He shares from his experiences how churches can partner with their local schools and become a positive, proactive influence for change.
Hey Saturday Sports Leaders & Volunteers!
At our last 20/Twenty event, I committed to trying to send out five new game ideas each month. Some of these activities you may already be familiar with and some may be new ones!
My hope is that we are sharing new game and activities ideas with each other so that we can Build A Saturday Sports Learning Community! In this community, we continue to develop and grow each of our Saturday Sports ministries.
It was a bit disheartening to see a recent article in the Fresno Bee sharing the Nation’s Report card putting Fresno Unified “near rock bottom”. We can talk for days about the problems, the issues, the reasons, and it’s easy to point fingers and cast blame. But you know what they say: “When you point a finger at others, four fingers are pointing back at you.” Actually, I believe they are pointing back at ALL of us, because we all have the opportunity to be part of the solution. So let’s talk about what you can do to help increase literacy, and the fulfillment that can be found in helping a child learn to read.
