What’s the best way to help your child be ready to read?
Share reading! Shared reading is the best way to help babies, toddlers and preschoolers develop the important early literacy skills they need to learn how to read independently later on. The more books children ages 0-5 hear, the more prepared they will be to learn how to read. A number of research projects have proven over and over again that children get ready to read years before they begin their formal education.
Our 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten program is for children who have not yet started kindergarten. From birth on, it’s never too early to start!
Here’s How it Works:
Come in to either Argenta Library or Oreana Library to register for the program. You will receive your first three log sheets.
Read a book (any book) to your newborn, infant, and/or toddler. The goal is to have read 1,000 books (yes, you can repeat books!) before your child starts kindergarten. Does it sound hard? Not really, if you think about it. If you read just 1 book a night, you will have read 365 books in a year. That is 730 books in two years, and 1,095 books in three years. If you consider that most children start kindergarten at around 5 years of age, you have more time than you think!
The key is perseverance. Make it exciting and fun! Reading should be a positive experience. Move on to a new activity when your child loses interest and try again later. Color in the circles or mark X’s on your log sheet and when your child reaches a milestone, every 100 books, come to the library to get a small reward. At the 500 mark your child will receive a book from the Kacey Derbort Memorial Book Foundation!
The program ends when your child reaches 1,000 books or when they enter kindergarten!
Come back in to the library to receive the Grand Prize: a 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten certificate, a Target gift card, and a book from the Kacey Derbort Memorial Book Foundation! With your permission, we will take a picture of your reader and add it to our electronic picture frame!
How to Grow a Reader
Reading aloud to your child is the single most important thing you can do to help your child be ready to read. You are your child’s first and best teacher. Children learn best through playful interaction with a caring adult. Talk, sing, read, write and play! Engaging in these five practices with your child will help him or her develop early literacy skills.
These five activities help support pre-reading skills through five early literacy components. The five early literacy skills are:
- Phonological Awareness: the ability to hear and play with the smaller sounds in words.
- Vocabulary: knowing the meanings of words: things, feelings, concepts, ideas.
- Print Convention: noticing print, knowing how to handle a book, and knowing how to follow the words on a page.
- Background Knowledge: the prior knowledge the child has learned.
- Letter Knowledge: knowing letters are different from each other, knowing their names and sounds, and recognizing letters everywhere.
To learn more, click here!