A donation by a famous writer has helped start an effort, called the United States of Readers, to help poor children read more books.The classroom program is being launched by Scholastic Book Clubs with a donation of $1.5 million from the writer James Patterson.Scholastic announced the program recently.It aims to bring books to 32,000 poor children who are in kindergarten to eighth grade.Judy Newman is president of Scholastic Book Clubs.She said in a statement that in many communities people do not have enough money to buy books.So she said her company "needed to come up with an alternative to our tried-and-true model, because every child needs to be able to choose and own books, and see themselves as a reader!"Scholastic is a large publisher of books for children and educational materials.Its goal is to get books into schools to increase literacy.
