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.

Not yet a supporter? 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.

One of the key components of Raising A Reader is our signature Red Bag book rotation program. We provide red bags filled with high quality picture books to our early childcare and community-based program partners in Gateway Cities. The program partners will then distribute and rotate bags to the individual families on a weekly basis so that these children will have new books in their homes regularly. Here is what our parents have to say about the red bags:

One of the reasons that I like the books is because we get them weekly as you know, there are constant fresh books. So with this winter being so cold, sometimes we have not been able to get to the library as often. So it’s basically a trip to the library getting the new books. You know my son he likes books and he do like “ Mammy, new books! My Red Bag!” or something.

It helps us a lot, books are expensive and it’s hard for us to buy him books. You have to keep buying them. He likes books. He goes through them pretty quick. He gets to know the story, but then he wants a different book. But buying a book in the store even at TJ Maxx, there are expensive. So I like this that he can have books in the house. You know he gets a new book to read and stuff and it helps us with our budget.

Another thing which is really important to us is that the books in the bags are very diverse culturally as well as abilities. In the books maybe somebody have not a hand or is in a wheelchair or something like that. It allows us, you know he might pick up things like that and we can talk about it. The world is full of everybody and so which is actually one reason why I like his school in the first place because everybody is there no matter what your race or ability is or even other things we were diverse about. What we see in the world is reflecting in his school and that’s also reflecting in the RAR books. I like that and like I said of course it does affect him because we can have build his vocabulary on these things and have conversations about these things.

Continue here for stories from parents (and a kindergarten teacher) about how the program has helped their children build up pre-literacy skills.