Welcome everyone to Building Blocks/Flagstaff County! My name is Joanne McMahon and I have previously been a volunteer tutor, which was such a good experience. The lady I tutored was such a delight and I am happy to call her my friend today. In the last year, my role with Flagstaff Community Adult Learning

has changed. I am now a “Builder” in the newly created Building Blocks program. Last Winter, Nanette started dropping hints that she had the dream of starting a Family Literacy Program of some sort. In the Spring, I resigned from teaching for 20 years in Flagstaff County. Nanette, then started dropping more than hints about this proposed program. And I have to admit, I was interested. We explored various programs available in Alberta and settled on the Building Blocks program. It was actually developed by Sue Stagmeyer, a teacher who lived just 5 miles from where I live now, she has since move to High River and is at the helm of an amazing Literacy program that helps hundreds of people. Nanette and I traveled to Calgary and took the week long Building Blocks training. As the Flagstaff Adult Tutor Coordinator, Nanette has noticed the need for a Family Literacy Program for years. In my role as a Kindergarten teacher, I have noticed the academic gap continues to become larger each year among the children beginning school. In 2012, the Alberta Government did a study of all five year olds in the province called the Early Childhood Development Mapping Project. Upon completion of this study, it was found that 33% of Flagstaff Counties children a lacking in their thinking and reasoning skills. Thus, this gave us hard data to go with our soft data. Flagstaff County needs a Family Literacy program. Family literacy works with the whole family. It benefits the children by giving them skills to better perform in the academic and social environment and it gives parents strategies and ideas to better assist all their children. It builds on the idea that a parent is a child’s first and most important teacher. This is the whole premise of our Building Blocks program. In October of this year, our program began. Our program is thrilled to be able to work with 6 families and 9 children, aged 1 ½ to 4, on a weekly basis. We also run an hour long program at the Lougheed Library on Tuesday afternoons for anyone interested in attending. We have had excellent turnout to this program. The families we have had the privilege to work with are welcoming, willing and simply want the best for their children. They welcome me into their homes and for an hour we learn together. It is really the most fulfilling work I have ever done as a teacher. We have enough money to continue our program until Christmas, and are searching frantically for funding to continue into the New Year and beyond. This program is good for families, it is good for our communities and it is good for Flagstaff County. And I am humbled to a part of it. Let me show you some of the learning that takes place weekly, on the day Nanette snapped the pictures you are about to see, there was no school, so we had all 18 children from these 6 families and they were all delightful.