All of us at Readeo are delighted to welcome Abrams as our newest publishing partner. Abrams is renowned for its art and illustrated books, as well as its highly entertaining and literary books. Our first group of titles runs the gamut from a picture book for preschoolers to two books aimed at readers from ages 6-8.

Blue-Ribbon Dad by Beth Raisner Glass, illustrated by Margie Moore, stars a squirrel who’s planning a surprise for “the best dad that I know.” For slightly older children, we offer a picture-book biography of the renowned Mexican fine artist and muralist, Diego Rivera: His World and Ours by Duncan Tonatiuh. Also aimed at older readers, we offer the only picture book written by the author of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, called The Crows of Pearblossom, illustrated by Sophie Blackall. This fable features Mr. and Mrs. Crow as they bring about justice when they catch their neighbor Rattlesnake taking eggs from their nest.

We hope you enjoy reading and BookChatting with these latest selections!

With all my best,
Jenny

Jenny Brown is the editor for Readeo and oversees all book selection for the site. She has worked in the children’s book world for the past 25 years, holding positions with HarperCollins and Scholastic, and was the Children’s Books Reviews Editor for Publishers Weekly.  She currently writes for School Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, and Shelf Awareness. Jenny graduated from Princeton University. You can read more from Jenny on her Web site, Twenty by Jenny.

I’m very excited to announce a new Readeo initiative today!

The best thing about BookChat is that it lets us read to and connect with the children we love from anywhere. With Readeo, Internet access, and a webcam, we can read with children a block away or half a world away. My son has a better relationship with his grandparents because they spend time reading together every week.

Children today need more adults to take a sincere interest in their education, learning, and development. 70% of children reaching the 4th grade now read below grade level. This is an unbelievably sad statistic and we hope, in a small way, that our new program can help begin to reverse the tide in this literacy crisis.

We’ve partnered with Chicago International Charter Schools (CICS) to create an entirely new volunteering experience. We’re calling it eVolunteering. Our eVolunteers will read to children in CICS’s Loomis Primary Campus using Readeo’s BookChat technology. This means a Readeo eVolunteer from Florida could read to one of the children at Loomis in Chicago. Each week, our eVolunteers will read with the same child for 30 minutes.

We are piloting this project with one 2nd grade class of 27 students. We’ll be reading with these students in two different sessions at 1:30 CT and at 2 CT each Thursday beginning on March 3rd.

We’d love for you to sign up as an eVolunteer. You can eVolunteer from your office, home, school, or local coffee shop. It’s free to participate – all we need is your time and commitment. If you’d like to become a Readeo eVolunteer, please fill out a short eVolunteer application by clicking on this link!

Finally, I would like to thank Meghan Schmidt at CICS and April Shaw at Loomis  for their enthusiasm and help in setting this up! They’ve been fantastic to work with! And, a special thanks to Sandbox Industries for sponsoring the equipment for the school!

Readeo is a proud partner of the Read Today program—a literacy initiative that promotes literacy and an interest in books all year long throughout the state of Utah. As a piece of that partnership, we were invited by KSL TV in Salt Lake City to join in the first annual KSL Book Festival at the University of Utah last Saturday.

Part of the Read Today Summer Challenge, the festival was all about celebrating imagination and the written word and featured New York Times best-selling authors Richard Paul Evans and Brandon Mull, performances by David Osmond, Paul Cardall, the Creativity in Action Dance Co. and others. While we were there, we also saw Ronald McDonald, Curious George, princesses, and even a few Star Wars characters.

The festival was a fun, free family event and a great opportunity to talk with some of our users and to share the Readeo experience with new people. It was great to see the excitement of children and adults alike as they watched Readeo CEO Coby Neuenschwader share storytime as he BookChatted with his niece over the Internet.

We want to thank KSL—particularly Nadine Wimmer, Angela Folsom, and Steve Poulson—for their dedication and proactive approach to literacy, and for allowing us to be a part of the festival. We hope it becomes a regular event to celebrate books, reading, and imagination.

We just have to say it: “Mil Spouses” are awesome.

We spent last weekend at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada with around 200 of our country’s finest. The SpouseBUZZ Live event was put on by the good folks over at Military.com’s SpouseBUZZ, and since we believe Readeo can be a huge benefit to military families who are usually stationed far from those they love, we sponsored a table there to get to know these good people and offer them Readeo accounts in thanks for everything they do for our country.

It was a fantastic event that showed the true class of the presenters. The show was completely free to attendees and offered panels and discussions on the trials and sometimes humorous experiences of being a military spouse, life insurance tips, and a sort of personal storytelling experience. Oh- and there was great food and thousands of dollars worth of prizes given out.

Readeo’s little table (left) and the very funny Mollie Gross entertaining the crowd (right)

Vince, the MC for SpouseBUZZ, called it “a sort of revival” and I think he was right. At it’s core, SpouseBUZZ Live is a group of people bound together by common experience, common goals, and a common desire to support others in similar situations. It was a time for people to open up and share their knowledge, trials, and triumphs with what were essentially strangers, but who treated each other like—and eventually became family.

I came away with a much greater respect for the people who really support our troops: their spouses.

A special thanks to Military.com and SpouseBUZZ for having us, and to the good ladies (and a few men, too) who shared their stories with us while we were there. You can see more pictures with a complete rundown of the event on the SpouseBUZZ blog here.

Hello everyone!  I just wanted to take a second to make you aware of something you may not have heard of.  Did you know that in addition to being the home of April Fools and Easter, April is also the Month of the Military Child?  The Month of the Military Child was created to recognize military children and the sacrifices they make while their parents serve in the military.  More than 1.7 million children under the age of 18 have at least one parent serving in the military! (more…)