After six years of growing Raising A Reader
After six years of growing Raising A Reader
After six years of growing Raising A Reader from 50 community partners to more than 400, we’ve seen that RAR’s seemingly simple approach is powerful. Our partners rave about the program and its effect on children. As nurse Nicole says, “The book bags literally open doors for me.” One Head Start teacher wrote on a recent program evaluation, “I see the change in my children. They are excited about reading at home and school, they care for books better in the classroom, they participate more in storytime.” A Head Start administrator praised the way RAR complements the Head Start curriculum: “We are committed to a classroom curriculum that exposes children to a wealth of good literature, yet the time we have with them is limited. The key to achieving literacy is creating families that read. That is what Raising A Reader does.” And parents are also delighted with RAR. Every year they fill the program evaluation forms with comments like this recent one: “Our child used to come home and watch TV. Now she would prefer us to read to her.”
Many of our partners and parents stress that, in addition to falling in love with books, their children develop a sense of responsibility through RAR. Children learn to take care of the bags and books, remember to bring the bags back to their classrooms, and help their teachers check that there are four books in each bag. Library staffers savor these words, knowing that responsibility is as important to kindergarten readiness as knowing the alphabet,cfl bulbs, having phonological awareness, and being motivated to read.
Six years of outcome-based evaluations of our RAR program have shown huge increases in the number of parents who share books with their children three or more times a week, and the number of children who spend more time looking at books and ask someone to read to them. Even more exciting are the changes parents have made in their reading practices. For example, in 2010�2011, there was a 124 percent increase in the number of parents who pointed out pictures and talked about them, and a 136 percent spike in those parents who talked about new words during book-sharing time. There was also a 113 percent hike in the number of parents practicing dialogic reading, a technique that stimulates conversation with a child by asking him questions. We librarians have been known to swoon over these numbers. We’re well aware that these are the practices that lead to early literacy skill proficiency and kindergarten readiness.