Once entering any of our classrooms (babies, preschool, toddler, pre-school, pre-k or our after-school program) there you will notice books everywhere. We know that reading is critical to the development of a child. With each day planned out around a specific theme we always incorporate storytelling into the day. Additionally, we encourage our parents to continue what we are doing when they are home with their child, by making reading fun! By knowing the theme in advance, a parent can check out books at the library to read at home. Children that read are typically happier and smarter, so it is critical for our teachers and parents to incorporate reading many times in a day. We encourage parents to also let the child pick out their favorite books at home to read or when going to the library. It never ceases to amaze our teachers when students get to pick out books, how often they pick the same one. Yet, we read it because they love it! We love to make the story come alive by using different voices or different levels of audio to make it more fun. The more engaged the children are in reading or hearing a story the more they want to learn to read. As always, we have our books separated by different levels, so they are understandable at the level of reading for the children. If it is too high of a learning level, then their interest will not be there and we want our children to be fascinated with reading, so they are reading in our pre-k program. In fact, The Ohio State University College of Education and Human Ecology did a study on the importance of reading to kids daily. The amazing part of this article was that” children who have five books read daily enter kindergarten with 1.4 million more words than a child who was never read to”. This is just one more reason why we take reading seriously. Kindergarten teachers in Defiance, OH are always giving our daycare wonderful remarks, because the children graduating from our program are ready for kindergarten! Our biggest complement is when kindergarten teachers put their babies in our program till, they start kindergarten, because they know that they will be ready, which includes reading. Parents love that their child is learning the love of reading at daycare by not just reading books but engaging in reading and we use a host of programs including Hooked on Phonics to help them learn to read themselves. The director, Darline Clemens, not only got her master’s degree from Defiance College but she worked there for many years in the library department as the Director of Media Resources. She has a love of reading and hires only teachers that have this same philosophy.
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