Val St. Francois ELE committee celebrates new books for the holidays
For a fourteenth year, the Val-SaintFrançois region’s Comité d’Éveil à la Lecture et à l’Écriture (ELE), which works to foster reading and writing skills in youngsters in the MRC, has helped to nourish the imaginations of local children and pique their interest in children’s literature by offering a new book to children of families who have received a Christmas basket.
This activity was possible thanks to the generosity of 11 of the 18 municipalities in the Val-Saint-François MRC. Through this year’s donation, 174 children were given a new, recently published book as an end of year gift in the idea that in order to learn to love books and reading, one must be exposed to them and have the opportunity to explore their pages and be exposed to their treasures. Books were provided in French or in English depending on the language indicated by the basket recipients when registering for their baskets.
The participating municipalities were : Bonsecours, Melbourne Township, Cleveland, Valcourt Township, SaintClaude, Richmond, Sainte-Anne-de-laRochelle, Stoke, Ulverton, Val-Joli and Windsor. The ELE committee is grateful to these communities fro having made financial contributions to make the annual project possible. A huge thank you is also owed to the partner members of the ELE committee: the Maison de la famille Les Abrisseaux, the CPE Magimo, the Yvonne L. Bombardier library, the Community Learning
Center in Richmond as well as to dedicated volunteers Danielle Bédard, Ginette Gratton and Gisèle Lebel.
The ELE committee is committed to its mission given the fact that access to reading and writing materials from an early age has been found to have a significant impact on the learning processes of our young people.
Together, let’s continue to foster a love of reading.
The ELE Committee has the mission of working with community partners such as community organizations, libraries, and daycare services, to help build strong foundations for lasting educational success through exposure to reading material from an early age. While projects are limited by the pandemic, the committee normally provides a number of tools and activities to families in the region. Past projects of the committee include the creation of family planners that were made available for free to families from the Val St-Francois and the Lire-et-fairelire program which pairs volunteers with “reading buddies” through local schools and daycare centres.
The committee is a part of the CDC du Val-Saint-François, which is a group of community organizations at work in the Val-Saint-François MRC. The CDC’s primary mission is to promote cooperation between different community organizations in order to enable them to actively participate in the social, community and economic development of the region.
For more information about the work of the ECE committee or the CDC as a whole, call 819-644-0133 or email cdc.vsf@gmail.com