Budding Readers

Reading Partners read and discuss books weekly with three-year-old children in child care centers to help them blossom into life-long lovers of books, reading and learning.

Reading Partners work with their assigned children each week to help them develop and increase the oral language and emergent literacy skills that are the foundational components needed to build future academic success. Oral language and emergent literacy skill development are incorporated into the reading and discussion of age-appropriate books with the children during their weekly book sharing sessions. Children also receive books from their Reading Partners to keep and begin a personal home library.

Through the Budding Readers program, Reading Partners play an important role in the development of young children by providing the one-to-one time needed to help ensure that preschool children from low-income households enter kindergarten just as eager and ready to learn as their more advantaged classmates.

2008-2009 Program Outcomes:

  • 9 Reading Partners at 8 partnership sites served 210 children
  • 4,949 books were distributed to the children to begin a home library
  • 96 percent of the children developed a positive attitude toward reading and books

PROGRAM IMPACT

Children clamor to Ms. Susan, our Reading Partner, and gain confidence and trust as they receive one-to-one attention. Shy children readily talk with friendly puppets or characters they have just met in a favorite story. Not only are the books paired with great learning activities, the entire world of learning is opened up with children eager to leap right in. Often children help read the story as they learn letters, sounds and words.

Parents love Ms. Susan as much as the children do. The books sent home for the child to build a personal library help create lifelong memories of the family reading together.

The Budding Readers Program is setting a firm foundation for learning. We follow the children who leave our center through their kindergarten year. On standardized early literacy tests administered in kindergarten, scores for our children have improved since we have taken part in the Budding Readers Program. Together, the Budding Readers Program and the YWCA Child Development Center are writing the book for success!

Sheryl Benveniste, Center Director
YWCA of Palm Beach County