By Traci Newell

Joe Hu/Town Crier Judy Liu, Share Literacy volunteer, shows off one of her finger puppets. The puppets will be used in teacher training classes to promote literacy in the home.

Even if you are a small boy, you can help a village solve its problems. That is one of the lessons children will learn this fall.

Volunteers gathered at Los Altos Library on Saturday to help make finger-puppets for the Share Literacy program that will benefit children in Berkeley schools.

The finger-puppets, based on the Hoopoe children’s book “The Clever Boy and the Terrible, Dangerous Animal,” will be used in teacher-training workshops conducted by Share Literacy.

The Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge, a non-profit educational organization based in Los Altos, supports Share Literacy and Hoopoe Books.

Share Literacy helps low-income children and their families gain access to literature they may not have in their homes.

Hoopoe Books is an award-winning series of large-format illustrated children’s books by Afghan author Idries Shah. Shah presents tales from the rich tradition of storytelling.

“We want to help as many children as we can get books who don’t have books,” said Sally Mallam, who runs the program.

Share Literacy promotes reading and thinking skills in disadvantaged children by supplying them with specially chosen books.

Because of a recent grant from Kaiser Permanente, Share Literacy is able to serve five Bay Area organizations and 3,700 students.

The volunteers at the library were creating the “clever boy” in “The Clever Boy and the Terrible, Dangerous Animal.”

The story tells of a boy who finds a village that is terrified of a watermelon because villagers have never seen one before. The boy shows them what a watermelon is, and they learn all the advantages of the fruit.

Share Literacy trains teachers how to present the books to the children. The teachers are provided with activity guides pertaining to the book.

“We are giving them the facilities and helping parents understand how important reading a book at home is,” Mallam said.

The program also distributes kits for each student to take home. The kits include bilingual literature for parents, which describes the benefits that come from reading to their children at home. The kit also includes a bilingual edition of a book that was read to them in class and a CD of the book.

“Programs are bilingual because many parents don’t read well in one area,” Mallam said. “This calms their worries and tells them just how important it is to read.”

Share Literacy was lanched in 2000. The Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge was founded in 1969. In 1998, the institute started the Hoopoe Books imprint. It has donated more than 100,000 Hoopoe books to disadvantaged children in 10 states over the last four years.

For more information, call (408) 872-1484 or e-mail shareliteracy@comcast.net.