Happy Raising A Reader Day! To celebrate, we will be sharing stories and quotes from the families we serve throughout the day. Of course, none of this can happen without our wonderful supporters so we would like to take this chance to thank you again for your generosity and as you will see from these stories, your contributions have definitely made a positive impact in these families’ lives.

Our program team is dedicated to engaging parents in the communities we serve. They spend a lot of time talking to parents and partners about the positive impacts of using dialogic reading in their story times, especially in building vocabulary and other pre-literacy skills. Here is what our parents (and a kindergarten teacher) have to say after using our program:

First, he wasn’t talking and Anthony has a lot of different issues. So it helps that I could get a book that he was interested in and that gives us time to be along together and to hold each other, I think it was more of a safety thing to Anthony at first. That he was safe in my arms, quiet, we were reading the books. Now he loves reading, he loves me reading to him. And now he’s talking and try me to tell the story. It help me learn to how to deal with certain things with him. I’m happy we have the books because even at school trying to get him to talk or anything and now the teacher showing him pictures and some things the other children don’t know yet but Anthony knows like what was a nest, a flamingo . So I wouldn’t think of telling him these words but getting it from the books and reading about them he’s trying to say a lot more.

I’ve seen a change. He has talked to me, he is talking a lot more. Emmanuel has changed, these last three months, more than anything this month. It’s impressive the number of words he is pronouncing. I am definitely very happy with the program.

My particular class had also the RAR program in their preschool class and I definitely see the difference with those children and the children who came right into Kindergarten without any of our preschool experience, children who had experience with books they seemed to know the structure of a story, they seem to know how books work, they have an understanding of how prints works and how the interactions works between the illustrations and the text, that they go together.

Support the amazing work our program team is doing! For $12.50 a month, you can sponsor one child and his/her family with early literacy materials needed to deliver the Red Bag book rotation for one year. For $125 a month, you can sponsor one new classroom of children and help strengthen the culture of reading at home. Start making a difference today!