Read to Me Project

What to know:

The family is a baby’s first teacher. A child’s development during the first five years of its life is the foundation for learning through the rest of its life. The earliest literacy experiences prepare a child with the language, vocabulary, and cognitive learning capacity that can set the course for a lifetime of greater success, equity, and opportunity.

Literacy begins at birth and 85% of brain development occurs before age five. By five, a child’s language and vocabulary skills have formed the foundation for literacy and school success.

Assuring a lifetime of greater opportunity:

Read to Me Project is changing the lives of children in low literate families. Every book shared, opens a door to new wonder and learning. Every book read, brings a world of knowledge into homes where life experiences may be limited by poverty, low literacy, or circumstance. Fear of the unknown can be replaced with curiosity, information, and confidence in one’s abilities. Inequity is displaced with opportunity, hope and agency for all who can read and write. Literacy is the great equalizer, bringing people together around ideas, laughter, possibilities, shared amazement, and inspiration.

Preventing low literacy:

Read to Me Project (RtMP) helps under-served children achieve kindergarten readiness and a lifetime of literacy by empowering school age brothers and sisters to read to their young siblings at home. RtMP provides children ages 6 months to 5 years with a foundation for language and learning by being read to by their 4th, 5th, and 6th grade siblings. Students are taught how the brain works and that babies are born ready to learn. Through coaching sessions with RtMP staff, participating students learn how reading to their young family members sparks the little one’s brain and inspires curiosity. This brilliantly simple effort between siblings is setting lives on course for a lifetime of equity and greater opportunities.

The Project was launched 2011 in 4 classrooms with 50 students reading to 60 little brothers and sisters. To-date more than 15,000 students and little ones have been impacted.

The impacts are proven!

An independent study released December 2019 revealed that RtMP students improved their standardized assessment scores, on average, 68% greater than did students who did not participate in the program.

www.readtomeproject.org