“If parents understood the huge educational benefits and intense happiness brought about by reading aloud to their children, and if every parent … read aloud a minimum of 3 stories a day to the children in their lives, we could probably wipe out illiteracy within one generation.”
Mem Fox, Reading Magic

Preschool Reading Readiness

Reading to a child is the single most effective way of increasing a child’s vocabulary. Accumulated interaction with good stories builds a preschool child’s oral vocabulary and phonetic ear for getting ready to read. Readiness occurs after many, many story times and parent-child dialogues about numerous topics from and beyond stories and is truly a cornerstone for a child’s reading, academic, and life success.

Reading Readiness, Graduation, and A Competitive Society

With no fond memories of cuddly family times with stories, rhymes, or songs from their own childhoods to pass on to their babies, parents may lack understanding of how to share language with their newborns to fours. In some families, generations may fail to nurture reading readiness and pass along school failure.

An unprepared four year old often fails to learn to read in first grade or primary school. Then dogged by reading problems throughout school, twelve years later, he drops out of high school (65% of high school dropouts have reading problems). As a parent he cannot guide his own preschool child’s literacy growth. Under-employment, poverty, crime, drugs, and abuse too often become society’s and the family’s legacy.