On Tuesday January 20, the Franklin Central Early Education program held a Family Literacy Night. About 16 families participated. We shared a dinner of pizza and salad. As folks finished dinner, Deb Grennon, Bookmobile Librarian, read Ella Sarah Gets Dressed to an enthralled group of parents and children. They especially liked her fancy red hat. She demonstrated how to pull kids into a story, help them ask questions and make predictions, and how to voice different characters.
Then, families moved their way through seven different activities to reinforce early literacy skills in preschool age children. They support letter identification, sight word re
cognition, sound and symbol matching, and playing with words and letters. Activities included matching upper and lower case letters, writing in shaving cream and sidewalk chalk, finding letters in magazines and newspapers to make words, I Spy words and letters with items from the kitchen cupboards, cutting out pictures from magazines and catalogs and organizing them by their first letter, and putting letters together with clothespins on a hanger to form names and words. The parents and kids tried all of the activities and 
then received printed directions to take home. All the materials needed for activities would typically be found at home, or be very low cost. The idea was that parents would be able to do these activities at home with their kids to help build those important early literacy skills.
At the end of the evening, the kids chose a brand new picture book to take for their home library. We also made resources available for parents to take home about the importance of reading with their children and promoting their early literacy skills.
cognition, sound and symbol matching, and playing with words and letters. Activities included matching upper and lower case letters, writing in shaving cream and sidewalk chalk, finding letters in magazines and newspapers to make words, I Spy words and letters with items from the kitchen cupboards, cutting out pictures from magazines and catalogs and organizing them by their first letter, and putting letters together with clothespins on a hanger to form names and words. The parents and kids tried all of the activities and 
then received printed directions to take home. All the materials needed for activities would typically be found at home, or be very low cost. The idea was that parents would be able to do these activities at home with their kids to help build those important early literacy skills.We were also happy to see the St. Albans Messenger sent a reporter to cover the event. Hopefully we’ll see a small blurb in next weeks paper.
We also wanted to thank Mimmo’s of St. Albans for the pizza donation and Pricechopper and Hannaford’s for the drinks and paper goods.
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