Appendices: Other Organisations and Projects Supporting Early Years Reading
Contacts | Further Reading | Useful Websites | Other Organisations and Projects
A. THE NATIONAL LITERACY TRUST
http://www.literacytrust.org.uk
The National Literacy Trust is an independent charity that creates literacy partnerships to change lives. The Trust has a strong commitment to promoting projects that help teachers and librarians involve families in supporting their children's developing literacy.
These include:
- Talk To Your Baby encourages parents and carers to talk more to children from birth to three. The campaign provides a one-stop shop for information on early communication to encourage, inform and disseminate good ideas among early years professionals, parents, future parents and the media. A wide range of free downloadable resources are available from the Talk To Your Baby website, including Share books and talk together which encourages communication between parents/carers and young children through book sharing. There is a handout for parents as well as reading and talking activity ideas Also available is Quick tips - sharing books with your baby. The Quick tips are available in 12 languages. For more information visit http://www.talktoyourbaby.org.uk/
- Reading Connects, a DCSF-funded initiative, supports schools in building a whole-school reading culture to encourage children to develop a love of reading. Reading Connects enables schools to access all the great ideas that schools and organisations have developed to get the whole school reading and, of course, the school library is central to this approach. As part of the Family Reading Campaign, Reading Connects developed a family engagement toolkit which has proved very popular - over 80,000 copies have been downloaded from the site. This toolkit has led to many early years settings joining Reading Connects and a demand for the toolkit to be rewritten to meet the needs of early years settings. With the support of a wide range of early years professionals, this adapted toolkit should be ready by April 2008. This will coincide with the launch of Early Reading Connects which will pull together a wide range of resources to support early years settings in involving parents in encouraging reading.
Find all about Reading Connects at http://www.readingconnects.org.uk/
Download the family engagement toolkit at http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/readingconnects/familytoolkit.html
Find out about Early Reading Connects at http://www.earlyreadingconnects.org.uk/ (from April 2008) - The Family Reading Campaign is helping to create a coordinated national and local infrastructure to support family reading and literacy. The website is full of excellent case studies from a wide range of sectors on how to engage families with reading. Many of these focus on early years settings. The site also has a special area for resources and information aimed at parents as well as a wide range of editable downloadable resources to help early years settings and schools engage and involve parents.
Visit http://www.familyreading.org.uk/
For advice and resources for families visit http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/familyreading/parents/
For resources for professionals visit http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/familyreading/Resourcesindex.html - The early years section of the NLT website is full of up-to-date information on news, policy, research and initiatives relating to literacy in the early years.
Visit http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/Database/earlyyears.html - News - Keep up to date with literacy related news as it happens. Literacy news is updated daily at http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/literacynews/
B. THE READING AGENCY
http://www.readingagency.co.uk/
The Reading Agency inspires children's reading through nation-wide programmes delivered mainly through public libraries. We're a national charity and reading development agency, and work to make reading a bigger part of more people’s lives; families are a key audience for this work. In 2008 we are lead partners in the consortium delivering the National Year of Reading, working to mobilize the power of public libraries during the year.
We help libraries engage actively with readers, through national change programmes and partnerships, through smaller experimental pilots, and by providing practical resources, toolkits and materials which draw on successful project work.
We offer promotional materials to help libraries promote their services to key groups: Got Kids? Get Reading!™ promotes reading to parents with literacy needs who have children under 7 years, while Five Minutes™ materials are aimed at dads with literacy needs who have children under 10. Using these materials, we run projects to develop partnership work between libraries and early years settings, in order to introduce more families with young children to the reading services of public libraries.
We run a family reading programme in prisons called The Big Book Share™, funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. This enables parents in prison to read stories aloud and make recordings to send home to their children. And we work to support prisoners to continue reading with their families on leaving prison by helping to establish good links with their local public library service on release.
Every year, the Summer Reading Challenge™ engages over 650,000 readers between 4 and 12. For children who have not yet reached 4 we offer a link with Bookstart's Book Crawl which enables even the youngest children to get involved alongside their older brothers and sisters, making the Challenge a whole family experience.
Public libraries run a variety of events and activities for early years children and their parents. We support the whole range of libraries' work with young readers through an online training resource for library staff at http://www.theirreadingfutures.org.uk/
C. BOOKTRUST
Booktrust is an independent national charity that encourages people of all ages and cultures to discover and enjoy reading. The reader is at the heart of everything they do.
D. ASCEL (Association of Senior Children's and Education Librarians)
ASCEL works strategically to support library initiatives for children and young people across the UK. Every library authority is a member. With ASCEL's support libraries run Early Years programmes to engender a love of books and reading. The initiatives libraries offer for the under fives and their families include Bookstart, rhyme times and story times.
E. CLPE (Centre for Literacy in Primary Education)
CLPE is an educational centre for schools and teachers, parents, teaching assistants and other educators. CLPE has a national and international reputation for its work in the fields of language, literacy and assessment.
