Story Planet

Robin (http://www.neighbourhooddiaries.com/) and I headed down to Harbourfront Community Centre where we were kindly invited to speak at their Family Literacy Day event.  Great to see such a good turn out and to see Chris Bolton (school trustee for Ward 10) there too.  So what’s FLD all about?  Check out http://www.abc-canada.org/en/family_literacy_day for ABC’s info on the day they created back in 1999.  In a nutshell, its encouraging families to hang out and read together.  Here’s some reasons why, beyond just being fun, sharing books is important:

1. Conditions the child to associate reading with pleasure, as association that is necessary in order to maintain reading as a lifelong activity.
2. Contributes to background knowledge for all other subject areas, including science, history, geography, math, and social studies.
3. Provides the child with a reading role model.
4. Creates empathy toward other people, because literature values humanity and celebrates human spirit and potential, offering insight into different lifestyles while recognizing universality.
5. Increases a child’s vocabulary and grammar, and has the potential to improve writing skills.
6. Improves a child’s probability of staying in school.
7. Improves future probability of employment and higher quality of life.
8. Increases life span by virtue of correlated education, employment, and higher quality of life.
9. Lowers probability of imprisonment.
10. Improves problem-solving and critical-thinking skills that are fundamental and transferable to all other areas of learning.
11. Offers information.
12. Offers laughter and entertainment and an alternative to television.
13. Improves attention span.
14. Stimulates the imagination.
15. Nurtures emotional development and improves self-esteem.
16. Reading skills are accrued skills that are bound to improve over time…a countdown to academic success.

- Author Esmé Raji Codell summarizing author Jim Trelease’s book, ‘The Read-Aloud Handbook’

Today we got the great news that Story Planet has received a grant from the Ontario Arts Council to keep doing in-school workshops!  As our workshops are free to the kids themselves, all financial support is gratefully received.

Story Planet is searching for a home, a place that can act as a centre for the workshops, a gathering place for other creative people wanting to inspire kids, and a surprising little coffee shop!  We’ll be looking at some locations over the next little while and I’ll be holding my breath waiting for that ‘Yes!” moment when the right place shows itself.  Stay tuned!

Well, things are very exciting.  Story Planet is supporting Neighbourhood Diaries who received a grant from Fresh Ground at Harbourfront to have an exhibit in the spring in the Harbourfront gallery.  The exhibit will be of stories and artwork from 10 different neighbours around Toronto where an artist, a writer and kids have come together to create.   You should see some of the fantastic things being generated!  While Story Planet has been helping in an overall way with the workshops, I’m also the writer at the Harbourfront Community Centre.  We met for the first time on Tuesday and had a fabulous time!  Amazing kids!  Many thanks to Michael at Room 13 for being a great host – check him out at  room13canada.ca

And in more news!  Trace Pictures and Story Planet are working hard to create an inventive, interactive and innovative (I’m sort of limited with ‘i’ and alliteration is largely overrated anyway!) site for kids where they can create, play and share.  Check out Trace at tracepictures.com This will be produced with TVO.  More to come as we move forward…

Welcome to Story Planet!  Story Planet provides literacy workshops to kids in schools and, in the near future, in our storefront location.  We’re inspired by 826national.org, a fantastic organization started by Dave Eggers that has seven centres throughout the States.  Our goal is to get kids to dig into their creative and communicative voice through writing, art and digital media.  Keep coming back for updates on our search for a space, info on workshops and tantalizing snippets on all things creative and literate!