Children need access to books and increased reading motivation.
- Only 43 percent of fourth graders report that they read for fun on a daily basis. Among eighth graders, only 19 percent report daily reading for fun. (NCES, 2001b; NCES, 1999).
- Fourth-graders who reported daily reading for fun scored higher on the NAEP reading test than peers who reported less reading for fun (NCES, 2001b).
- Children who score at the 90th percentile on a reading test spent five times as many minutes per day reading books as children at
the 50th percentile (Anderson, Wilson & Fielding, 1988). - Two-thirds of American classrooms have fewer than 50 children's books, and almost 60 percent of childcare centers buy fewer than one book per child a year (Neuman et. al, 2001).
- Fourth-graders who reported having 25 books or more at home had higher scores on the NAEP reading test than children who reported they didn't have that many books (NCES, 2001b).
- Families play an important role in their children's reading success.
- Studies of individual families show that what they do to support literacy in the home is more important to student success than family income or education (Ballen & Moles, 1994).
- Reading is more dependent on learning activities in the home than is math or science (College Board, 1994).
- When adults interact with young children — talking, singing and playing rhyming games — they stimulate language and vocabulary development and build important foundations for learning to read (Hart & Risley, 1995).
- Reading to preschoolers is the most important thing families can do to prepare them for reading (Adams, 1990).
- Reading aloud to infants stimulates their brains to create new learning pathways and strengthen existing ones (Shore, 1997).
- Less than half of families read to their kindergarten-age children on a daily basis (West et al., 2000).
- In 1999, only 53 percent of children aged 3 to 5 were read to daily by a family member. children in families with incomes below the poverty line are less likely to be read aloud to everyday than are children in families with incomes at or above the poverty line (NCES 2001a).