Actress and singer, Victoria Justice and Detroit Tigers outfielder, Justin Upton unveiled JetBlue’s ‘Soar with Reading’ book vending machine program for kids who may otherwise not have access to books.
The machines will be installed at locations across the city and provide free books to kids living in ‘book deserts,’ or areas where they have limited access to buy age-appropriate books.
Children and their parents will be able to take home as many books as they want all summer long. New books are put into the machines every two weeks.
Interesting facts about reading
- Reading for 6 minutes a day reduces stress by 68 percent.
- When children have a home library, as little as 20 books of their own, they achieve 3 more years of schooling than children who don’t have any books at home.
- Read 20 minutes a day and you’ll read 1,8000,000 words per year.
- Children who read 1,000,000 words a year are in the top 2% of reaching achievement.
- Children learn 4,000 to 12,000 words per year through reading.
- Kids in classrooms without classroom libraries read 50% less than kids in classrooms with libraries.
- If you read just one book a day to your children, they will have been read 1825 books by their 5th birthday. (Every Day Counts. Every Book Counts.)
- The three books that have been read the most are: The Bible, Quotations From Chairman Mao Tes-Tung, and Harry Potter.
- Harry Potter was rejected by 12 different publishers before Bloomsbury accepted it. J. K. Rowling also had to change her pen name to be more neutral: her publisher believed this would encourage more boys to buy the book.
- The world’s oldest continually operating library was established in AD 565. It is housed in Saint Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt, and has the second largest collection of ancient manuscripts after the Vatican City.
- The first book ever written on a typewriter was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.
- The Biblioteca Joanina in Portugal has an unusual method of keeping their books clean. A swarm of bats live in the library and feed on book-eating insects at night, helping to preserve the 300-year-old building and the many books it harbours.
- The longest novel ever written is À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust, at 1,267,069 words long.
- After following over 17,000 people in England, Scotland and Wales over 50 years, researchers at Edinburgh University proved that reading well at age seven was linked to better socio-economic status even 35 years on.
- Adults who read for only 30 minutes a week are 20% more likely to have greater life satisfaction.
- Sixteen-year-olds who read books for pleasure outside of school hours are more likely to secure professional, managerial jobs in later life.
- Children who frequently read books at 10 years old, and more than once a week at 16 years old, gain higher results in math, vocabulary, and spelling tests than those who read less regularly.
- Adults with lower literacy levels believe they have little impact on political processes, and are less likely to participate in volunteering activities.
- Researchers at Carnegie Mellon found that the volume of white matter in the brain increased in people reading over a six-month daily period, improving participants’ brain structure and ability to learn.
- Reading proved 600% better at fighting stress than playing a video game.
- People who read books tend to be better at learning new languages, too.
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