The executive of the Saskatoon and District Reading Council met August 21, September 23, and again on October 19 to make plans for the upcoming year. One of our intended outcomes is to improve communication with our members. We want to increase active participation of our school liaisons and we are working to build relationships with them via mail, e-mail, and reading liaison meetings.

The SDRC will continue to support and promote literacy through continued participation in the annual SRC activities such as the Gift of Reading, Read to Me, and Young Saskatchewan Writers. Our council will also continue to support the Newspapers in Education program through the work of Fernando Ferrer at the Star Phoenix. New in our plan this year is to provide support for our Saskatoon Public School System’s Literacy for Life conference.

This will be a busy year as we work together to plan the 2011 SRC reading conference in Saskatoon. We have secured The Travelodge as our venue and we have invited keynote speaker Gerald Duffy, educator and author of Explaining Reading. We are so happy to have him as we are particularly interested in finding ways to engage the middle years teachers in attending the conference and in becoming active with our council.

We are pleased to announce that our council was advertised in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix in the Raise a Reader edition on September 23.

Respectfully submitted by
Maureen Bezanson
Saskatoon and District Reading Council