President's Column
By President Joyce Mak
Bring Me A Book, Achieve Our Dreams
It has not been an easy task for our Service Project Director, PP Dominic and myself to think of a community service project for this year in response to the RI theme "Make Dreams Real" to help reduce child's mortality rate in the world. Instead, we would like to undertake a literacy project for children in the local community with our partner-in-service, Bring Me A Book Hong Kong (BMABHK), a non-profit organization. Their mission is to provide easy access to the best children's books, educate parents, teachers and childcare providers to read aloud with children for future success in school and life. This organization act as a partner with non-profit organizations and assist them to seek for donors who are willing to donate bookcase library and book bag library to serve children who do not have access to quality books.
We truly agree with BMABHK's belief and we are delighted to organize this meaningful project in relation to literacy for this Rotary Year. As usual, Rotary has always been committed in creating and promoting awareness of literacy among children and adults worldwide; and Rotary clubs have been working with parents, teachers and educational institutions to promote reading habits among children.
Our aim in this project is to build public awareness the importance and benefits of reading storybooks to children at a very young age; to reach out to different communities and children/ families who lack the access of good quality reading material and training; and through the reading aloud mechanism, we hope to foster and develop parent-children relations in the family. Our project is divided into different phrases. Firstly, a charity concert named "Musical Story Book" will be jointly organized with SAR Philhamonic Orchestra on 21 September to benefit BMABHK. The first part of the concert will feature 3 young performers playing piano, violin and cello respectively. The second part will be presented in the form of an interactive story telling session with a narrator, featuring a famous musical piece derived from "Peter and the Wolf". The performance seeks to show that reading story books can be fun and that there are different ways to enjoy it, either through reading or singing out loud. Part of the proceeds of the sponsorship fees will be given to the printing of a couple of thousands of unique Chinese book list. As it has been widely aware that it is quite difficult to choose some good quality Chinese books in HK, and through the support of printing this book list, we hope to provide an alternative source for parents and teachers.
The second phase of the project is to get our Rotarians, spouse, their children and other volunteers to participate in the "First Teachers" training program organized by BMABHK. This training session is to equip them for the third phase of the project and the objective is to help the volunteers to learn the skills of reading aloud strategies and understand the importance of reading aloud to children.
The third phase of the project is to engage the beneficiaries in the local community who will receive our bookcase libraries donation. We will take the participants who attended the "First Teachers" program to conduct story reading sessions to our beneficiaries. Our aim is to arouse the awareness to parents and teachers the importance to raise children's interest in reading picture books and by reading aloud, this will also enhance the parent-child bonding experience.
For the last phase of the project, we intend to organize a Read Aloud Marathon Event at a public area, for example at a shopping mall. This aims to demonstrate the importance and effectiveness of the outreach training session we conducted in the previous stage and to further arouse the awareness of reading both good quality English and Chinese story picture books publicly. We will also invite parents, children and teachers who participated at the reading sessions to share what they have gained by reading aloud in public or performing role plays for one of the stories they have heard previously.
WE NEED YOUR HELP!
* We urgently need your support by sponsoring the charity concert
* To be one of the donors in sponsoring book case libraries
* To participate in the "First Teachers Training" Program
* To be a committee member of the project
* To help promote our project at Rotary Clubs
Do spread the words and lend your hand to support this meaningful literacy project. We look forward to the success in achieving the objectives of the project; to continue in creating the awareness of literacy and to enhance the communication within the community in general and between parents and children.
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