[stylist] Successful Braille event

[Bridgit Kuenning-Pollpeter]

I thought I would share with my fellow writers and lovers of literature an
exciting event my NFB chapter did last weekend. As chapter president, I have
been pushing for more outreach with my chapter again. We use to be great
with outreach activities in our community, but in the last few years, we
have gotten away from doing outreach. So in January, I put together a
Braille outreach committee, and we have planned a couple of events for the
year. Last Saturday, we participated with a local library's storytime hour.
Our members read children's stories in Braille, and our members participated
with the children and parents in the other portions of storytime like the
songs. We also helped to prepare a craft for the children. We took a picture
of a cartoon whale so the kids could color on it, but we also spelled whale
out in Braille at the bottom, then helped the children glue on Honey-comb
cereal onto the Braille dots. It was a great time with great exposure for
our chapter and Braille in general. My husband and I had an opportunity to
speak with parents and the storytime coordinator. Declan was running around
with his ankle bells on, and so many parents thought it an ingenious idea
and thought they could benefit from putting bells on their children, LOL!
But I was so excited to participate in this program, and we were invited
back to participate whenever. We have another scheduled reading time with
another library in September, so looking forward to that.

And Declan checked out his first library book. He would not put down Truck
is Stuck, so we decided to check it out, and he's obsessed with it, LOL! He
grabs it all the time to read and looks at it for chunks of time, and it's
become his number one (no pun intended) reading material for the bathroom,
grin.

Bridgit