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Montgomery County Extension Homemakers

County Programs

Literacy Attainment
This programming is accomplished through a grant awarded through the Jean Ann Behney Endowment Fund. This grant has assisted programming that is in its second year.

Major accomplishments for 2008-2009:

Our major accomplishment for the 2008-2009  year was coordination with Even Start, Head Start, and Pleasant Hill Developmental Preschool as well as Lester B. Sommer, and Sugar Creek to present the Dialogic Reading Technique and create awareness of the importance of emergent literacy development.

At Pleasant Hill we coordinated to have Jennifer Dobbs, Assistant Professor at Purdue University, present Dialogic reading technique in a workshop for parents. We also had story teller, Bonnie Yund, to work with the youngest children. The North Ridge Middle School Child Development Class had planned activities for older children.

Additionally, we developed a 4-H Reading for Fun project that was introduced this year. We wrote and introduced this project as a way to promote literacy enjoyment and extend the reading experience for 4-Hers. We felt this partnership would offer a way for students to engage in 4-H and also promote reading enjoyment. Some of the project exhibits include making advertisements for a book you read, giving book talks to preschool children at the Extension Homemakers 4-H Fair tours (coordinated with the Montgomery County  Junior Leaders)  to promote reading and its enjoyment.  We introduced this project to the county at the Montgomery County 4-H Expo and then again at the In Montgomery County Everyone Reads event hosted by the Gamma Phi Sorority. The In Montgomery County Everyone Reads event also gave us the opportunity to have interested parents sign up for a Dialogic Reading Workshop to be coordinated with their school corporation as well as to pick up some information on how parents can best support their children’s reading development.

We will continue to coordinate with other school corporations to engage more parents in the ideal of literacy and its enjoyment as well as reach out to children and students through the gifting of free books at our events.

Last Updated: March 27, 2009