Thank you to the Asda Foundation!

Thankyou to the Asda Foundation for their grant of £430.00 to enable us to deliver a children and parents reading sessions, run by our speech and language improvement qualified staff. Many children are still not at an acceptable level of language/reading to be “Primary School ready”, this is mainly due to COVID and the isolation many nursery children experienced. Some families do not have access to books and it is not the norm to sit down with children and read them a story.

Our group is all about instilling a reading ethos in families. Many parents want to relax at the end of a busy day and may feel they only have energy to sit in front of a screen. But we’ve found that encouraging parents to read regularly can improve their wellbeing, and indirectly support their children as reading role models into their teens.

Alongside the reading group we use story sacks which contain CD’s to sing along, puppets for role play, bright mats and cushions.

The session will be run once a week, 1.5 hours for 6 weeks, with no more than 4 children and their parents/guardians attending. We hope that children and their parents will benefit from this structured session focusing on one book each week. The aim is for parents to actively read to their children at home, we have links with other groups who deliver reading support for adults, so could refer adults if required, would signpost to the library for children’s books. The benefits are huge and life long e.g. cognitive and language development, expanded vocabulary, improved listening skills, bonding with parents, increased attention span, creativity, life lessons and social and emotional development.

Once one group has finished, we would start another group enabling many children and parents to benefit throughout the year.