Hi everyone,
Wintry day with sleet in the forecast. Let’s hear it from everyone who likes winter.
Yesterday my friend Sony Hocklander came to the house to make a video of me promoting Ozarks Family Voices. Here’s the script for the three minute project.
Hello, I’m David Harrison for Ozarks Family Voices, a program run by literacy advocates who know how important it is to read to children on a regular basis during their years of fastest development – from birth to age five.
When you make reading to your child a nightly routine, you’re doing more than sharing precious quiet time with your little one. You are also providing one of the best gifts any parent can give a child. When kindergarten rolls around, children who have been read to at home are better prepared to learn than those who have not.
Learn more about us on our website. (http://ozarksfamilyvoices.org.)
Here is how you can become involved with Family Voices.
Call Gail Gourley at The Library Center on South Campbell. (417-882-0714.)
Or call Cathy Farr at The Library Station on North Kansas Expressway. (417-865-1340.)
Make a date to go in and read a book for your child under five years old. Bring your own book or let us provide one to read. We’ll record your voice and add it to the first track of a free CD containing 25 other stories recorded by community leaders. Not only that, we’ll give you a free book for each child in your immediate family.
When you’re too busy to read to your child, play the CD or download all twenty-five stories from our website to your computer or other device. Almost 1,000 parents have already recorded their voices and collected their free CDs and books. Please join us! It’s easy, it’s fun, it’s free, it takes only a few minutes, and it’s oh so important.
On behalf of Ozarks Family Voices (and your child), we thank you.
During the course of making the video, we paused more than once for flocks of geese flying past the patio gabbing among themselves loudly enough to be heard on the recording. We took down the wind chimes in the back yard for the same reason. Finding the right space with the right light on a gloomy day required moving some furniture: sofa, chairs, lamps, and such. The phone rang twice. Once was from a neighbor telling me that the bald eagle had returned and was perched at the top of a tree at the north end of the lake. We broke for that! I’m eager to see the pictures that Sony took with her Canon camera. Later Sony returned to the yard to collect pictures of dozens of geese easing across the ice covered lake.
Although the script is short and I wrote it, I perform better when freewheeling than when reading from a prepared talk. We decided it would be better to shoot in short sections and I would talk to the camera instead of working from the script. That went better if you don’t count a lot of start-overs for one slip of the tongue or another. I’m grateful to Sony for her patience. I’m sure she hadn’t scheduled so much time into her Saturday afternoon for this little project. I hope the shots of eagle and geese helped make it worthwhile for her!
Meanwhile, Family Voices will soon have a new video to go with one made earlier at The Edge in Springfield’s Midtown Library. Both will be available to help us continue our efforts to attract as many parents as we can to let us record their voices and encourage them to read on a nightly basis to their children. It’s that important.
Children's Author David L. Harrison's Blog 