Our friends at the Connections Early Years Centre were kind enough to send us an update on how they’re making use of our support from earlier this year.
This is from their mid-term report, courtesy of Barb Brown, Executive Director:
Thanks to the Volunteers for Literacy Grant, Connections was able to purchase books to provide to families in our Early ON and Talk 2 Me programs.
Using the money provided, we were able to purchase 20 new multilingual books for our Early ON families to engage with at our Centre, in both English and their first languages. This includes a set of books for a variety of reading levels in French, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi and Chinese. These books include classics such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, and Pete the Cat by James Dean, so that families of all languages can participate in some of the most common stories and books shared in our Early ON.
We also purchased books to provide Early ON Come and Play families with books they can take home as part of our ongoing programs surrounding literacy, numeracy and many others. Examples of this include being able to provide books to each child participating in our Baby Group and our Growing Up Together group, where children 3 and up have the chance to foster their self-regulation, self-help and social skills. Many of these children will be attending school in the Fall and developing their early literacy skills. Children who attend our Tuesday afternoon Family Math also received books picked to help them foster early math skills such as number recognition, shapes and patterns. In total 56 early numeracy books to Early ON families thanks to this funding.
In September, books will also be given to families who participate in our Readers are Leaders play sessions, focusing on the importance of early literacy and engaging with literacy as a family. Thanks to this funding, 30 books were purchased to provide each child an age-appropriate book to take home in the Fall.
In summary, total books purchased for Early ON families is 106 and they were chosen to help children develop their love of reading, but also topics such as nutrition, outdoor learning, diversity and inclusion, positive role modeling, feelings, and many more.
Our Talk 2 Me families have also begun to receive books (one per child). We estimate 250 families will receive these books for those children in the program who are not meeting early literacy milestones as identified through speech and language assessments. To date, we have distributed 24 books to these families. The intent is to ramp up the distribution in August as the older children transition to school and we begin new speech groups in September.