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November 29, 2023
12:15PM - 1:15PM EST

Fostering Child Literacy with Your Patients

Live Webinar

“I encourage primary care providers to incorporate Reach Out and Read and/or Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library of Ohio into their practice. You can positively impact the reading proficiency of the children you treat by talking with their parents/caregivers about the information and resources available through these literacy initiatives.”
  ~ Ohio Department of Health Director Bruce Vanderhoff, MD, MBA

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Skills that build the foundation of language and literacy begin at birth. Oral language skills developed in the years before kindergarten predict how ready a child will be for engaging in the kindergarten curriculum. According to the Ohio Department of Education state kindergarten readiness assessment, about half of all Ohio children entering kindergarten are not on track in language and literacy. While progress has been made since the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on child learning, only 60% of Ohio 3^rd grade students are proficient in reading, and the reading rate is even lower in some subgroups.

Primary care providers offer trusted guidance to parents/caregivers and play a critical role in the growth and development of children physically, mentally, socially, and emotionally. In Ohio, some clinicians at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center have shown that there are benefits to a healthcare provider talking about and promoting reading to children and their parents/caregivers and sending them home with a book. They also have found positive benefits of communicating to parents/caregivers about the opportunity to receive books at home at no cost to the family.

Many primary care practices participate in Reach Out and Read (ROR) as a way to foster early cognitive and neurodevelopment in children and strengthen bonds between children and their parents/caregivers.

Benefits of this program include:

• ROR evaluation data shows that families participating in the program read more frequently to their children.
  
  
• Children exposed to the program had higher receptive and expressive language scores.
  
  
• Increased exposure to ROR has led to larger increases in language scores.
  
  
• Children had higher scores on the Home Literacy Orientation.

Other primary care practices promote Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library of Ohio which helps families build a home library for their growing child by sending an age-appropriate book to them every month free of charge from birth to 5 years of age. Benefits of this program include:

• Research has shown that a child with 25 books in the home completes an average of two additional years of schooling compared to their peers without books in the home.
  
  
• Children who participated in the Dolly Parton Imagination Library scored significantly higher on Kindergarten Literacy Assessments than their non-participating peers and this trend continued into the third grade.
  
  

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