President Lynn King welcomed all and called the meeting to order
Kevin Courtney offered the prayer and led the Pledge of Allegiance.
photo credit Barry Davis
New member, Joah Etchells (left) is inducted by Bruce Yeager (right) as membership chair Jonathan Eggert looks on. Joah is sponsored by Julie Camp-Tome and he is President of Perfect Painters & Paper Hangers, Inc. He has been attending meetings and helped with holiday basket delivery. Please make sure to meet Joah and welcome him to the club.
Jon announced that this is the second posting for Beth Kuzmick.
Kristin Keller introduced her guest Lauren Hollis
Greg Wynn recognized John Farrenkopf who is a Paul Harris +8. Greg thanked John and all members for their support of our charity - The Rotary Foundation.
Next Saturday, January 23 we will do clean up at the high school Corey Malphrus will send out details. This is a good project to get the family involved.
Sergeant at Arms, Suzi Oliver welcomed visitor Ray Erstine who visited via Zoom. She also collected Happy $$.
President Lynn emphasized the importance of membership and encouraged all to share Rotary with others. A good way to introduce them to our club is to invite them to a meeting or to participate in a service project.
Speaker:
Suzi introduced the speaker Tom Henz and shared his bio. He has been very active in the community and several community organizations and has recently retired from banking and wants to teach more at USCB. His topic was Early reading. While not having a lot of experience, he said he was talking from the heart.
photo credit - Barry Davis
He began by stressing the importance of early grade reading and the need to learn to read before Fourth Grade. It is critical to learning and is the cornerstone of educational outcomes and directly correlates with high school graduation rates. Two thirds of American fourth graders are not reading at grade level and 1/3 of them are below basic. Third grade reading scores are a predictor of life success, but 18 month vocabulary is a predictor of third grade reading scores. The number of books in a home correlates significantly with higher reading scores and children who are read to at least three times a week are almost twice as likely to score in the top 25% in reading. Mr. Henz shared the good news that while children do not come with instructions, there is a booklet that will help Beaufort County parents and parents to be - "Collaborate from Birth to Eight for Early Grade Reading". He read the forward by Bruce Marlowe. Reading is the gateway to magic....... The booklet is a guide for parents of young children. It has been shown that babies begin learning while in the womb. The booklet provides many resources and lists the seven programs of the partners in early reading. The partners are: Beaufort County First Steps; Beaufort County Library; Born to Read; Boys & Girls Club, Bluffton; Boys & Girls Club, Hilton Head Island; The Children's Center; and United Way of the Lowcountry. He told of his experience mentoring children in the United Way program. There are five pillars of literacy: Phonemic Awareness - Learning the sounds of one's language; Phonetic decoding-connecting letters and sounds; Vocabulary - building children's word power; Reading fluency - read naturally; Comprehension. He spoke of "The McGuffey Reader" and his proud association with three others from Miami University. The goal of Collaborate is to get this information out to the parents. The plans are to produce the booklet in Spanish and if it is successful, create booklets for other areas.
He stressed that there is no substitute for parent/care giver participation. All the partners often can use volunteers. If you know children, encourage them to read. Children are our greatest treasures.
You can learn more about each of the partners' reading programs by visiting their websites.