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By GEEARS
Have you ever heard someone say, “Why take your toddler on vacation when they won’t remember it?”
Given the cost of a lot of adventures, it’s a fair question. But we have a great answer, which also applies to more accessible outings like a sports game, a birthday party, or our favorite, a trip to the library to listen to story hour and check out a stack of books.
Even though a toddler won’t consciously remember such experiences, they’ll still have a profound impact on their brain development, which is most active and prolific—at the rate of one million neural connections formed every second—in their earliest years.
In other words, that vacation or story hour is both an imprint upon and an investment in your child’s future health, development, and well-being.
Nowhere is this truer than when it comes to early literacy, something we’re celebrating because September is National Literacy Month.
According to Reach Out And Read, a national early literacy organization and GEEARS partner, “Experiencing and engaging in language-rich interactions helps children develop communication skills, patience, empathy, and literacy—all of which are critical to success in school and beyond. Even the simple act of handling books develops school readiness in infants.”
Learn 4 Life adds, “In third grade, students move from learning to read to reading to learn. From this point on, reading at grade level matters tremendously to stay on course. Students who do not read at grade level by third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school than proficient readers.”
But GEEARS’ Early Childhood Checkup shows that only 38.7% of Georgia third graders are currently scoring at proficient or higher on their third grade English-Language Arts Milestones assessments.
This is why GEEARS leads initiatives like the Mayor’s Summer Reading Club, which annually creates original board and picture books featuring a customized READ guide that helps caregivers amp up the literacy benefits of reading with their children. Then, the MSRC teams up with partners to create language–rich, thematic programming and send all attendees home with free books.
But the best way to make early literacy a part of a young child’s daily life—and ensure they get the most developmental and academic bang for the buck—is through high quality early childhood education.
Unfortunately, such critical high-quality care and education isn’t accessible to all children. In Georgia, child care tuition can eat up significantly more of a family’s income than rent, even though the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states that it should cost no more than seven percent of a family’s income.
For families with low incomes, high–quality early education may be out of reach entirely, unless they’re awarded child care subsidies from Childcare and Parent Services (CAPS). This is no easy feat. Only 5.2 percent of income-eligible children (per federal guidelines) received CAPS scholarships in the past year, and even those families can find themselves losing their subsidies—and their child’s spot in preschool—due to administrative fumbles or falling outside of the stringent income and work requirements. Atlanta child care provider, Angelique Dutch, says that such a child’s lost time cannot be made up.
“If you a miss a week or two, or two months or six months out of your preschool development?” she posits. “That’s a long time in the life of a two-, three-, or four-year-old. The preschool environment is critical and they’re not going to be ready for public school if you don’t give them that early foundation.”
This is why increasing state support for child care scholarships for hardworking, low-income families, from CAPS—a measure favored by 89% of parents of young children surveyed by GEEARS last year—is extremely high on GEEARS advocacy agenda. During Georgia’s 2024 legislative session, GEEARS proposed a $20 million increase in CAPS funding. Ultimately, a $9.3 million increase ended up in the final budget. We’ll shoot for further progress next session, with the irrefutable evidence about early literacy’s long-term benefits at the top of our talking points.
As GEEARS strives for more funding to equalize access to literacy-building early education, parents and caregivers can draw on resources to build early literacy at home.
Use National Literacy Month as inspiration to infuse literacy into your child’s days as much as possible. Just like that vacation, the impact might not be readily apparent. (In other words, you’re unlikely to have a little prodigy reading their own books at age two.) But all those efforts, especially the ones that have your child snuggling into your lap to read books with you, will shape their brain—their social-emotional growth, their vocabulary, and best of all, a love of stories and reading.
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The post In Honor of National Literacy Month, Let’s Increase Access to the Best Early Literacy Source: High-Quality Early Education appeared first on SaportaReport.