Tuesday is International Literacy Day.

First celebrated in 1966, the day was created to highlight the importance of literacy to communities, individuals, and society.  

Saskatchewan Minister of Education Don Morgan read to the grade one students at a Moose Jaw school and acknowledged government literacy programs that are in place currently.

"We work within communities to try and have mentors going out and encourage people to spent time reading to their children or just reading books in a broader sense. We also have our libraries across the province, we we're working with libraries to have shared services for electronic books and that sort of thing."

This year the Government of Saskatchewan allocated more than $2.4 million to fund literacy programs benefiting adults, children and families.

Morgan read the book "A Prairie Alphabet" to the kindergarten class, and spoke afterward about how literacy ties in to the government's education goals.

"We know that we want to improve early years literacy, middle years literacy and our First Nation numbers. We know that our graduation rate in the province is just a little over 70 percent, our goal is to get them up to over 80 percent by 2020."

"When we formed government the graduation rate was actually just only a little over 30 percent," Morgan continued. "We want to get that well over 50 percent, we're making progress in that area but we've got a lot of work to do."

Here in Humboldt the Reid-Thompson Public Library used the day to kick-off their 3-5 year-old Storytime program. Children were introduced to the building blocks of literacy, the alphabet which was followed by the reading of "Stone Soup."

Storytime will be held each Tuesday at 2pm. It is not too late to register, call the library at 306-682-2034 to do so.