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I have been signed up with First Book for several years. I teach kindergarten and first grade at Dayton Public Schools in the poverty-stricken inner city of Dayton, Ohio. I get plenty of emails from First Book, but have never received one book. Most books seem to be located in a warehouse in a large metropolitan area. You would have to drive a truck through states to get there.

– Mary Reed
Dayton Public Schools

Hi Mary,

It sounds like you signed up with First Book to get new books for your students, but we haven’t been able to help you make that happen yet. Let’s fix that.

There are actually two different ways you can get books from First Book.

The First Book Marketplace: Over 5,000 popular and award-winning titles, from board books to college prep, available exclusively to educators serving kids in need. This channel is great for teachers like you, who often need specific titles for their students.

The First Book National Book Bank: The nation’s only clearinghouse for large-scale book donations from publishers. These brand-new books are available free of charge (plus a shipping & handling fee), in carton quantities, and are perfect for educators or program leaders who want to help children start home libraries of their own.

Books from the The First Book Marketplace are available 24 hours a day, while books from the The First Book National Book Bank are available as new donations come in, usually once a month.

When we receive new books from publishers for the National Book Bank, they’re sent to a (borrowed) warehouse and we ship them out to everyone who requested books. We try to hold these local book distributions in different cities around the country, which helps people who can’t afford even the shipping charges.

But you don’t have to wait until there’s a book distribution near you. Once you’re sign up with First Book, you’re eligible for free books from every single distribution, whether the warehouse is in San Diego or Boston.

So the next time you get an email letting you know about a book distribution, check out the title list and let us know which books your kids will love and we’ll do everything we can to help you get them.

And we’ll put Dayton on our list of cities to visit someday soon.

Thanks for writing!

The post We’re Coming to Your Town Someday… But It Doesn’t Matter appeared first on First Book Blog.

Is there a teacher in your life who works with kids in need?

First Book needs your help in connecting 5,000 new teachers, librarians, reading specialists and school administrators with brand new books and resources for back-to-school.

Anyone working at a Title I school is eligible to sign up now with First Book (or any program serving kids in need; it doesn’t have to be a school).

Once they’re signed up, they’ll:

1) have access to the First Book Marketplace, where they can find over 4,000 titles, including books for reluctant readers, Common Core resources, Caldecott and Newbery award-winners and graphic novels.

2) receive regular email updates about new, free books donated by publishers and available through the First Book National Book Bank.

Encourage the educators in your life to sign up today at firstbook.org/join.

Or share this message via the social media buttons below.

The post Help Your Favorite Teacher Get New Books for Back-to-School appeared first on First Book Blog.

Hey! Do you work with kids in need? If so, then we have thousands of brand-new books for you!

Spanish, English and even bilingual titles for kids ranging from ages 4-18 are now available through First Book.

If you’re looking for fun and creative ways to teach Spanish to the children in your classroom or program, we have arts and coloring books that come with crayons and glitter pens. Many more Spanish titles are also available, including books from the Phineas & Ferb collection.

We also have bilingual titles that showcase familiar Disney characters while teaching vocabulary – examples include The Lion King: Movement and Cars: Colors, and an assortment of English titles to choose from such as Disney Nursery Rhymes & Fairy Tales and several books from the popular Blue Blood teen series.

These titles and more are available now! To get these books for free, sign up withFirst Book today. The books are available through First Book’s National Book Bank program; we take large-scale donations from the publishing industry and distribute them to the schools and programs in our national network.

We are excited to offer so many new Spanish and bilingual titles and hope you will not miss out on this great new selection of books!

The First Book team has had a busy summer, bringing books to Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Claysburg PA and the National Mall in Washington DC – with more to come.

We do lots of major books distributions, and we try to hold them across the country so that schools and programs that can’t afford the shipping costs for the free books can still get what they need for the kids that they serve.

This week? We’re in beautiful Lansing – capital of the great state of Michigan and home to the Lansing Lugnuts – and we’ve got 450,000 brand-new books that we’re distributing to schools and programs across the country.

If you’re in the neighborhood, drop by and say hello. As you can see, we’ve got quite a few books to move.

First Book distributes new books (80 million and counting) to kids from low-income communities all over the U.S. and Canada, but we do have a special place in our heart for schools and programs in Washington D.C. Not only are they are neighbors, but First Book got its start here in the District of Columbia 19 years ago.

So we were pleased to be able to provide grants to twenty schools and programs serving low-income kids here in Washington D.C.

Many schools in D.C. face the same lack of resources that affect so many programs serving children in low-income neighborhoods. Most public high school libraries have eleven books per student, but the library at Ballou High School has less than a tenth of that. The library at Woodrow Wilson High School no longer has a single fiction title. And the D.C. public high school for incarcerated youth has no library at all.

“Our needs are very great,” said Melissa Jackson, Ballou’s librarian. “We’re trying to build our nonfiction and fiction collections, so whatever we can get from First Book we will gladly accept.”

“We’ve recorded about 16,000 books over the last twelve years,” said Carol Fennelly of Hope House, a program that records videos of incarcerated D.C. fathers reading for their children. “And probably 50% to 75% of those books come have come from First Book.”

Each school or program received a grant of 500 free books from the First Book National Book Bank and $1,575 to spend on the First Book Marketplace, an online store serving eligible schools and programs in First Book’s network.

The books were made possible thanks to the support of the Philip L. Graham Fund.

“We will use these books for many purposes,” said Abraham Clayman of KIPP DC: LEAP Academy, a charter school that serves three-, four- and five-year-olds in the District. “We send them home with families, we put them in classroom libraries, teachers use them. I want to say thanks to First Book … we’re really excited about what we’re doing.”

Here at First Book, we understand how busy life can be for our Recipient Groups.  We also know that at the end of the day, when that bell finally rings and all those precious little ones pile onto the buses and head home, the last thing most teachers, principals or administrators need to deal with is trouble placing an order on the First Book Marketplace or confusion about completing a Book Bank application.

To make sure our Recipient Groups can get books from us as quickly and effortlessly as possible, we present to you . . . drum roll please . . . First Book’s very own Online Help Center! So if you have ever wondered: “What is the First Book National Book Bank?”  “How do I place an order on the First Book Marketplace for the first time?” Or “how do I update my registration?” then look no further!  The answers to all these questions (and many more) await you at First Book’s Online Help Center!

Of course we are always here to answer questions from Recipient Groups. But, since we can’t be in the office 24/7, we hope that our Help Center will make getting books from us as easy as possible.  So now, when that bell rings at the end of the day, all those little ones can pile onto their buses with backpacks full of books and minds ready to dive into the wonderful world of reading.