Advocacy
Read to Them is a not-for-profit organization spearheading a movement that advocates reading to children for just fifteen minutes a day. Listening leads to understanding. The benefits of comprehension during this brief period of listening are well documented. One major focus of Read to Them is our national public awareness campaign including these print ads (see below) that have been developed by the Martin Agency. Our goal is to impact the general public particularly parents of preschool children about the vital impact reading to them has on their pre-literacy skills.
If children hear words for two minutes daily, they will have heard 180,000 words a year, and with five minutes that becomes over 350,000 words in a year. Young children can be read to at any age, even as infants, and will internalize the sounds of words with delight as long as the duration of reading coincides with a child’s natural attention span.
Reading to children sounds simple, but the results are complex and permanent. Children who learn to listen eventually learn to read, and literacy skills provide the basis for a lifetime of learning and productivity. Unfortunately, literacy rates continue to decline despite the dozens of literacy programs in place in the United States. The reason for this lies in the fact that the programs seek to fix an existing problem, targeting children who have lagged behind goals and expectations. Reading to children for fifteen minutes a day prevents the problem, which is a far easier task than undoing the problem once it has become entrenched.
