Paging Mr. Guinness.
A national nonprofit is aiming to shatter its own world record tomorrow by having more than 1 million children and adults read the same book together on the same day.
Jumpstart, which targets the early-childhood literacy crisis by training college students to work with 4-year-olds in low-income communities, has chosen the children’s classic “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle for the attempt.
Carle himself will read from the book at the main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue at 9:30 a.m.
In the past three years, the group’s Read for the Record Campaign has secured more than 500,000 books for kids in low-income communities who had lacked age-appropriate books at home — a strong contributor to childhood illiteracy.
“What we’re trying to do with Read for the Record is to solve that problem — to get books into the hands of children,” said Jumpstart executive director Myung Lee.
In New York, Jumpstart is training 300 students at NYU, CUNY and four other colleges to work this year with more than 1,000 kids at 25 early-childhood programs.
Last year’s Read for the Record day got nearly 700,000 adults and kids worldwide to read the children’s book “Corduroy.”