A big thank you for attending our Volunteer Appreciation Tea last week; the highest attendance rate in recent memory! 🏆 Outside, the sun was shining, the paths through the garden were enchanting, and the fragrant smell of blooming flowers hung in the air. And inside, there was delicious food to enjoy, the opportunity to meet ONE TO ONE board members, and the chatter amongst yourselves as you sought to complete your Human Bingo cards. We really enjoyed seeing each and every one of you; it made us happy, and we hope that you were happy too.
The tea was also a time to acknowledge volunteers who were marking a significant service milestone. We handed out service award pins to those volunteers who have reached the 3-, 5-, 7-, 10-, 15, and 20-year mark. A big congratulations to all of them, especially Dana Fabbro for 15 years, and Mei Ling Tan for 20 of service!
But we weren’t done yet! We still had the Volunteer of the Year Award to hand out. Before doing so, we shared that we’d made a slight change to the category. Starting this year and going forward, we will have two Volunteer of the Year awards: one each for our in-person and virtual reading programs. For our in-person program, several worthy nominations were submitted by school coordinators, and it was Suzanne Mogan who was selected as the ultimate winner! Meanwhile, nominations from students and their families lead to Kamy Zargarpour being honoured with the virtual volunteer of the year award. Congratulations to all these award winners for your extra contributions to child literacy.
The final component of the Tea was hearing a presentation by local children’s author, Linda Bailey. Linda had prepared a series of slides, which began with how her love of books and stories first emerged as a young child. She then covered the key components (or archetypes) that make a good story and demonstrated how they applied to her book Carson Crosses Canada. Linda then finished her talk with a sneak peek at her new book, The Great Dinosaur Sleepover, soon to be on library and store shelves. Many of you commented on how much you liked the presentation with such sentiments as: “perfect,” “great” and “inspiring.”
The Tea is an important part of wrapping up the school year as it’s our way of acknowledging and honouring all that you do to enrich the lives of children. Helping them to learn new words, develop phonemic awareness, and increase fluency are all important steps in raising literacy rates. And yet, there is also the time you spend with your students, the care and dedication you give that has a real, lasting impact. ONE TO ONE would not exist without you; we are lucky to have you as are all our students and parents. Whether you attended the Tea or not, a big thank you for from the bottom of our hearts. 💖