Read Literacy Into Service

This week's Season of Service challenge involves serving with books, which can be great mediums for education and conversation.

10 Tips to Serve By Reading

Here are 10 bite-size ideas:

Donate your gently-used paperback books to the Prison Book Program to improve prisoners' access to educational materials.
Order an extra book in your child's next Scholastic book order, and donate it to your child's school or to Reader to Reader, a nonprofit that distributes books to needy school libraries across the country.
Donate your used books abroad through Books for Africa, International Book Project, and Biblioworks.org. Visit the American Library Association's page on sending books to needy libraries for a longer list of possible recipients. There are many.
Attend, sponsor, or host an event, such as a read-a-thon, for Reach Out and Read, a nonprofit that promotes early literacy and school readiness in pediatric exam rooms nationwide by giving new books to children and advice to parents about the importance of reading aloud.
Participate in a Virtual Book Drive for First Book
Attend your local storytelling festival, maybe taking along a friend who couldn't otherwise afford to go.
Volunteer for one month at your local literacy center.
Ask the librarian of your local middle school or high school if you can prepare a poster or other type of visual summary of a good book, to motivate their students to read.
Donate books or money to a charity, like the Ronald McDonald Houses, that provides assistance to families of hospital patients.
Donate a Borders gift card to a Christmas Box House.

What other ideas do you have for giving to others by reading?
How has serving others made a meaningful difference for you this week?
How have others given to you this week and what difference has that made in your life?

Make a meaningful difference this season by taking the Season of Service (SOS) Challenge. Here's how you can participate:

Commit to do one act of kindness/service based on the week's challenge.
Leave a comment with ideas relating to the week's challenge as well as your experience(s) performing it.
Enter to win each week's giveaway. Check out this week's prizes from ONE.org by clicking here.
Join #gno this Tuesday on Twitter to connect with other Mom It Forward moms about the challenge.