Babies Love Books
Auburn Rotary’s Centennial Community Project
When a newborn comes home from East Alabama Medical Center, the Auburn Rotary Club wants to ensure parents and other loved ones have something to read to the baby.
Parents of every newborn at EAMC will receive a packet including Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. Goodnight Moon tells the story of a young rabbit's nightly process of falling asleep under the watchful eye of “a quiet old lady who was whispering hush.”
In addition to the parents' packet, the Babies Love Books project will stock EAMC's Pediatric Library with baskets of other children's sbooks.
Nurses and other EAMC personnel in the Mother/Baby Unit will be provided with Babies Love Books pins for their uniforms as additional promotion of the reading program.
In addition to the Auburn Rotary Club and EAMC, sponsors of Babies Love Books are the Pi Chapter of Delta Kappa Gamma, Scholastic Literacy Partners, the Partnership for Reading, Davenport Moorhead Inc., Health Information Designs Inc., Rotary International District 6880 and Dean Road Elementary School.
The project originated as part of Rotary International's Centennial celebration, celebrating 100 years of community service throughout the world by over 1.2 million Rotarians.
Auburn Rotary Club's “Babies Love Books” packet includes resources to support the child's growing literacy needs and a copy of Good Night Moon(which contains the bookplate, pictured below).
“One in five adults in Lee County can't read,” says Rotarian Jim Golson. “If we can help parents understand the importance of reading to their newborns and establish family reading habits, we will be taking a constructive step toward this serious problem.”
Reading to babies and children is one of the most important things a parent can do to prepare their child for the future!
