Our Partners
Kindergarten Readiness
Work Team Partners
Our St. Louis city-county wide Early Educators Appreciation Event came back with a roar honoring 200 early educators on April 29, 2023 at Nine PBS with a champagne brunch and awards ceremony. Thirty-six phenomenal educators were nominated and five were recognized as outstanding.
Ms. Tiffany Hardwick - 2023 Early Educator of Excellence
Ms. Adrienne Pennington - 2023 Early Childhood Director Above & Beyond
Ms. Meg Kostecki – 2023 Home Visitor of the Year
Mr. Earl Green - 2023 Early Literacy Champion
Ms. LaDonna Smith - 2023 Early Childhood Education Champion
A 2024 Early Educators Appreciation is currently being planned. Sign up here to receive the 2024 Early Educators Appreciation Event Nomination form that will be distributed in November 2023.
Summer Learning
Work Team Partners
This summer 2023, five summer area camp organizations: Better Family Life, Gene Slay's Girls & Boys Club, Unleashing Potential, Wesley House, and the Gateway Region YMCA, at 10 locations, infused an an hour of literacy a day for their campers, ages five to ten. The focus was for campers to have fun with reading! Each day included 15 minutes of reading aloud, 15 minutes of independent reading, 15 minutes of writing, and 15 minutes of literacy games.
Thanks to area contributors and funders BJC, Book Harvest, the Dana Brown Charitable Trust, Clark-Fox Foundation, Emerson, Incarnate Word Foundation, Nine PBS, Saigh Foundation, and Light a Single Candle Foundation, each camp counselor received on-site training, and a literacy kit (co-designed by the area camp programs, Turn the Page STL, and Blueprint4.) The 70 kits included more than a hundred high-interest, culturally representative books, literacy games, notebooks, pencils, chalk, and a binder of local literacy resources. Campers were pre-assessed and post assessed in their literacy skills. In addition, at the beginning of summer camp, each site hosted a Family Book-A-Palooza where families could pick out free books for home and get a public library card.
Learn more at (VIDEO)
Family Engagement
Work Team Partners
Turn the Page STL and our Family Engagement Work Team wants families to engage in literacy every day! From mapping our literacy landscape to supporting Little Free Libraries and the phenomenal new Ready Readers Neighborhood Reading Captains program, our team is just starting. Trusting relationships (coaches, neighbors, pastors, pediatricians) are the heart of successful efforts