Family Literacy: Fort Resolution has no community library, and few places to buy books. Family literacy programs are important because they fill a gap in the community: they provide children with opportunities to develop emergent literacy skills, and they give adults opportunities to improve their literacy skill, while supporting their children’s literacy development. Family literacy is an integral part of the Fort Resolution program. Family literacy facilitators have organized and run the following programs:

• Reading Circle
• Preschool Reading Circle
• Books in the Home
• Families First: A Northern Parenting Program
• Special family literacy events.

Many of the program’s promotional activities help strengthen the importance of family literacy. Literacy workers put up posters with photographs of local children and parents around the community, conveying the importance of family literacy. As well, they post photo collages of family literacy activities in the learning centre and distribute them to stakeholders. Parents receive photographs of their children participating in literacy activities to reinforce the message that reading skills are important.

The Fort Resolution Community Literacy Program places a very high priority on emergent literacy skills. The school vice-principal and the adult educator are now working together to turn the school library into a public library. At the end of the 2002 – 2003 fiscal year, they used a surplus in one of the literacy program budgets, with the approval of the funder, to purchase much-needed new books and shelving, along with the equipment to catalogue and bar code the books. The funding also enabled them to hire a person to do the cataloguing.