Sharing books with your child on a regular basis is one of the most precious gifts you can give. The Literacy Foundation’s Bookbag Program is an initiative that provides families with bookbags on loan filled with quality children’s books appropriate for children from age 3 up through 6th grade reading levels. Each bag is filled with age appropriate books for children to share with their families. We now have three different reading level bookbags with varying numbers of books at each level.

The bookbags are a great way to encourage reading in younger students by allowing them to check out an entire “bookbag” each filled with up to 10 different books. This program is a wonderful opportunity for parents to instill a love of reading in their children while exposing them to a wide variety of books.

The bookbags are distributed through public schools, and public town libraries throughout NH and Western Maine. We currently have programs in Bartlett/Jackson, Conway, Freedom, Madison, North Conway as well as Brownfield and Fryeburg, Maine. We are looking for groups to help expand programs further into Coos and Grafton Counties in NH and Oxford County in Western Maine.

We also coordinate exposure in local preschools we visit through our “Books in Character” Outreach Reading Program. We distribute the bookbags to preschools and continue to rotate new bookbags every 4-6 weeks throughout the school year.  The list of preschools we serve is continually growing and we are constantly looking for ways to fund the purchase of new books and bookbags.

We seek individuals, groups, as well as corporate sponsors, to underwrite the cost of the BIB Literacy Foundation’s Bookbag Program, bringing books to children and families in the Mt. Washington Valley and beyond.