If you’ve been on social media this week you might have come across this article discussing the importance of reading to young children. The article states that a new study has found that ” Young children whose parents read them five books a day enter kindergarten having heard about 1.4 million more words than kids who were never read to “. This one million word gap has really helped put the importance of early reading in to perspective! As you can guess, here at the library, we love this study.

At Wellman-Scofield Library we participate in a great program call 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten, which encourages parents to read (at least) 1,000 books to their children before they enter kindergarten by providing incentives for every 100 book milestone. It might sound overwhelming and maybe impossible but if you break it down its completely doable. For example, if you start reading just 2 books to your child a day starting at age 1 you will have read almost 3,000 books to them by age 5! 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten is free to participate and there are lots of free goodies involved! It is quick and easy to sign your child up, just stop by the library and ask today!