At the recommendation of DG Alec, I have created a Facebook page dedicated to District 6900 literacy work. Our shared experiences offer the greatest source of information and inspiration for one another. This FB page - Rotary6900Literacy - is meant to be a platform for sharing literacy projects and ideas. Please tell your literacy story, as it will help someone in our district who is searching for a project or needs an answer to a question. Your failures and your successes are important for our learning. I will offer my story first, in hopes that it will propel others to tell theirs. District 6900 is rife with projects, each a dearth of information for our clubs. Tell your story and/or become a resource for the clubs of RD6900. Simply being able to answer a Rotarian’s question can lead to a project that leads to another child reading.

My Story: For 45 years, my passion has been to help little people read. I am a Rotarian, a Montessori teacher, the mother of three, the grandmother of four, and the champion of an early-literacy program called Souns. Souns is a hands-on, letter-sound program. Young children do not know how language and print fits together. How does print work? What does a particular sound look like in print? What does a particular symbol represent in sound? Research tells us that the greatest results come from interventions with children younger than 3.With Souns, intentional play is the classroom and the hand is the teacher. Simply: If you do not know letter-sounds, you cannot sound out words. If you cannot sound out words, you cannot read. Fundamental literacy speaks to the interests and sensitivities of the young child. By the time a child says, “I want to read!” he or she deserves to have a few of the most fundamental tools of printed language in place to begin the journey into literacy.

Now It is Your Turn! Share your talent, project, and experience (good or bad) to Rotarians in our district.

My contact information: mailto:brenda.c.erickson@gmail.com. I strongly urge anyone interested in fundamental literacy to read Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read.