How can you promote local literacy while helping children and families?
Easy! Volunteer at the Imagination Library Luncheon this September 21, 2022.
Click this link to sign up for the luncheon itself and the training beforehand.
In 2020, the Rotary Club of Eugene Metropolitan made a $5,000 grant to enroll 200 additional preschool-aged children in Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library program with an emphasis on Spanish language outreach.
“I know there are children in your community with their own dreams. They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister. Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer.
The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.” – Dolly Parton
The Eugene Public Library Foundation estimates: “40% of incoming kindergartners in Eugene 4J, and 82% of incoming kindergartners in Bethel School District are not entering school with the literacy skill they need to be academically successful.”
Worldwide, the Imagination Library has gifted almost 200 million books to children. What better way to promote literacy than to help children fall in love with reading in our own community?
Metro is grateful for the opportunity to support this incredible program that does so much for children.
Feature image description: The Potter family sits in the grass surrounded by children’s books. Their toddler boy sits on his mom’s lap reading If I Were A Kangaroo. His mom is holding Llama Llama Red Pajama and his dad is holding Jake At Gymnastics. The whole family is smiling. All rights © Eugene Public Library Foundation
2 Responses
I think supporting literacy in any fashion is great. I wonder if the club considered support of SMART Reading, Oregon’s early literacy program that has been operating for the past 30 years? I’ll admit my bias is born of spending the past 22 years as a volunteer and financial supporter of SMART. I’ve seen the power of pairing a caring adult reader with a child and seeing the child build their own library by year’s end. Keep supporting literacy!
September is Education and Literacy month! What better time to highlight such efforts in our local and international communities?!
Adopt-a-Village in Guatemala (AAV) created a bilingual early literacy program for Maya preschoolers in a few remote villages in the remote highlands. Here Maya children enter first grade speaking only one of the many Maya languages of this region. Government-run elementary schools expect them to keep up with a curriculum in Spanish, the country’s official languages. Many of these young children have never been exposed to Spanish, their parents usually illiterate themselves, remedial Spanish is not offered by elementary schools. Many first-graders struggle to keep up and often never quite make it to the next grade or beyond, so often drop out – thus perpetuating the vicious cycle of poverty among Maya families. Like most Headstart or SMART programs here, AAV’s Bilingual Early Literacy Program offers Maya preschoolers a chance to learn the basics (alphabet, numbers, etc) with stories and board games from Maya and Spanish-speaking teachers, assisted by student assistants from AAV’s Maya Jaguar high school. This program makes a real impact in this underserved remote area – one child and one village at a time!
More at https://www.adoptavillage.com/early-literacy