About T.V. Rotary RealeLibrary

Welcome to Loveland, Colorado and the Thompson Valley Rotary RealeBooks site!

The purpose of this site is to share with other Rotary Clubs, or interested groups, a project we have undertaken to promote literacy by encouraging and helping middle school students to author books for pre-school children. We hope you can learn from our experiences and create your own projects to promote literacy.

Our club was fortunate to have one of the creators of this web-based technology living in our community. We have taken advantage of this resource to create a program that, in this initial year, is putting 18 children’s books into the homes of each of the 375 pre-school children in the Thompson School District (TSD) Early Childhood Program. Program teachers tell us many of these children had no books in the home before receiving their first installment from our club. Along with the books the children are given instruction on the care of books and parents are reminded of the importance of reading to their children.

We plan on featuring many of the great books TSD students create and to share our experiences by blog entries, photos, and video to facilitate others beginning their own projects. We are grateful to the Rotary International Foundation and Rotary District 5440 for a grant to help us share this story.

Our club is excited about the many possibilities for service beyond our funding of the printing. For example we have worked with the middle school-age authors to cut and staple books, contributing our personal photographs, and we are delivering the books to the various pre-school sites and reading to the children. We look forward to someday partnering with a third world club to expand reading and writing opportunities for their children. We believe we can involve even more pre-school children by promoting sponsorships to other civic-minded groups. We are sure others will generate even more ideas.

We would love to hear from you what you think of our project and what ideas or projects you may undertake based on our template.

The Thompson Valley Rotary’s RealeLibrary features books written and designed by students. Our club chose to sponsor a RealeLibrary to make its contents available to other Rotary Clubs or groups who wish to start their own program or to download books for other literacy purposes.  We will intermittently post books that our club selects from participating schools that also have Reale libraries. We seek stories that are designed for pre-school students or early readers (k-1). We encourage anyone wishing to create a book to follow the guidelines within the content policy, which is located on the toolbar on the home page. Thank you for checking out our RealeLibrary!