What is the goal of Raising A Reader?
Raising A Reader's mission is to give every child an equal opportunity at life success by promoting daily book cuddling between parents and their young children. Raising A Reader is a take-home book bag program, which successfully reaches the toughest, most critical population: low income families where parents are poor readers or do not speak English well. It targets the first five years of life, a vital development window when 90% of brain growth occurs. The program has demonstrated a 471% increase in the percentage of low-income parents sharing books with their children five times or more each week. Head Start children using Raising A Reader tested at least twice as high as the national norms on print concepts.
How does Raising A Reader work?
Raising A Reader is a “take-home” book bag program, implemented through child care settings via a ready-to-use Classroom Kit. The unique design and delivery system makes this pre-literacy program easy and enjoyable for even busy, stressed families. The program creates magic that inspires even the non-reading or limited English-speaking family to engage with their child around a book and fall in love with reading.
Bright red book bags filled with beautiful picture books are rotated weekly among families. Over 100 literary-acclaimed books featuring appealing artwork, age-appropriate language and multicultural themes are part of this program. Children bring home the red bags and enthusiastically draw their families into sharing books with them.
The Classroom Kit includes training in “read aloud” strategies for child care providers and parents as well as additional tools for fun engagement tools that include our award-winning Read Aloud: Share a Book With Me video, available in eight languages, for each family to keep, and a matching bright blue “My Library Book Bag” that is given to each child to keep for frequent trips to the library. The program’s impact is sustained over time through on-going training opportunities for participants and links to libraries.
Learn
more by downloading the Fact Sheet.
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