Across Canada on January 27th, Family Literacy Day is taking place. The purpose of this day is to raise awareness about the importance of reading and engaging in other literacy-related activities as a family, and while it may be sometime before we can travel again, this year’s theme is Travel the World Together.
Family Literacy Day was developed by ABC Life Literacy Canada in 1999, and since then thousands of schools, libraries, literacy organizations and other community groups have taken part. Taking time every day to read (15-20 minutes a day) or doing a learning activity with children is crucial to a child’s development, improving their literacy skills dramatically, and can even help a parent improve their skills.
Some Facts about the importance of reading:
Children spend five times as much time outside the classroom as they do in school, so parents and caregivers need the tools to support their learning (source: The Read-Aloud Handbook, Jim Trelease, 2006).
Children whose parents are involved with them in family literacy activities score 10 points higher on standardized reading tests (source: The Effect of Family Literacy Interventions On Children’s Acquisition of Reading: From Kindergarten to Grade 3, Conducted by Monique Sénéchal for the National Center for Family Literacy, 2006)
One year of parental education has a bigger positive impact on whether a son or daughter will attend a postsecondary institution than an extra $50,000 in parental income (source: Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, 2011)
A parent’s reading skill is the greatest factor to affect their children’s future academic success, outweighing other factors, like neighborhood and family income (source: National Institute of Health, 2010).
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