Ongoing classes help with early literacy

<p>About once a month during the school year, they are making a difference.</p><p>Volunteer readers with the Johnson County Extension Homemakers go into preschool classrooms around the county and read a book to the children. Each child gets a book and a bag to carry the books, stitched by members of the Nimble Thimble homemaker’s club.</p><p>Johnson County Extension Homemakers volunteers have allowed an almost two-decade old early literacy program to thrive in Johnson County, where they help hundreds of students over eight classrooms across the county every school year. Tens of thousands of books have been donated to area children in the program.</p>[sc:text-divider text-divider-title="Story continues below gallery" ]<p>Johnson County was one of the first counties to adopt a statewide First Books for Kids program in 2001. The program is a non-profit organization organized by the Indiana Extension Homemakers. About five times a year, volunteers with extension homemakers travel to classrooms and read to the students. The club has donated about 11,000 books in total over the course of the program.</p><p>Extension homemakers value community and family in the dozens of programs and clubs that are maintained in the county, which makes a program that helps both an ideal partnership for the local extension homemakers, Marta Corbin, an organizer and past president of the local extension homemakers.</p><p>“We jumped on board immediately,” she said. “It is where we can do the most good.”</p><p>The idea behind the program is to help students who are mostly from low income families to develop a love of reading, Corbin said.</p><p>Volunteers go into eight classrooms at the Franklin Head Start, Greenwood Presbyterian Church and a school on the northside of Columbus, she said.</p><p>“(It is) to get them in the mindset to develop a love of reading,” she said. “A lot of them don’t have books at home, so they get really excited.”</p><p>The program is implemented by volunteers who are involved in the extension homemakers, with a majority of the volunteers being retired teachers and other professionals, Corbin said.</p><p>Part of the program is to get the younger students used to reading and children are encouraged to take their new book home and read it to their family, she said.</p><p>Money to fund the program comes from the Johnson County Extension Homemaker’s annual budget, which relies on donors and fundraisers such as the annual rummage sale, to put on the First Kids program and dozens of other initiatives the homemakers are involved in, Corbin said.</p>