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The Read To Me (RTM) programme is an organised series of workshops offering activities and supervised practice sessions that encourage young parents to read with their babies. Its objectives are to:
- Offer reading as a resource to young parents for pleasure, parenting skills, and psychological insights and educational development;
- Stimulate imagination and initiate early literacy education;
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Improve the potential for healthy parent-child relationships.
Many parents were not read to as children, and school may not have been a rewarding or successful experience for them. For many parents in London, English is a second language and English books, even children’s books, present particular challenges.
Read To Me offers parents the opportunity to experience the pleasures, psychological insights, and parenting tips available in children’s books. Unaccustomed readers learn about the richness of books, and how books can help them in raising their children, by experiencing reading in a positive, playful way. As a result, parents become more enthusiastic about reading to their own children.
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RTM workshops provide parents with approaches and techniques for enjoying books with young babies. Using picture books, parents are introduced to the concept of reading pictures to tell a story to their baby. |
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| Picture books can help to break down barriers for poor readers, alleviating parents’ fears of their own reading ability and encouraging the freedom to imagine and to create a story. This encourages parents to engage with reading and develops their confidence. In this way, the RTM approach offers a useful medium for parent and child bonding. It gives babies the opportunity to initiate communication and games with the parent. Parents in turn learn to understand and share ‘special time’ with their babies, observing their play and development. |
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RTM provides a model for encouraging reading in young families. It fosters success in the reader. Feeling empowered, parents may choose to return to education and improve their literacy skills and/or feel more confident to engage with their children’s education, learning and enjoyment. RTM has emotional and educational benefits both for the young parent and the baby and demonstrates a tangible intervention that addresses all the outcomes of the Every Child Matters agenda.
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In May 2008 Susan Straub came to London and worked with Ann Curno and Catherine Whitehead on developing a RTM initiative in the UK. Together, Susan and Catherine ran two ‘taster’ RTM workshops with groups of young parents in London, one at a Children’s Centre in Lambeth and the other at the Coram Young Parents Project in Camden.
Since then, Catherine has run the first UK series of workshops at the invitation of the school age parents’ advisor for the London borough of Southwark. The workshops took place over four consecutive days during July at Kintore Way Children’s Centre in Bermondsey. Seven teenage mothers attended the series with their babies who ranged in age from four months to eighteen months. During the workshops we shared picture books together, made personalised books for the babies, decorated photo frames containing a baby picture, visited the local library and gave the mums picture books to take home and read with their babies. Since 2009, Catherine has been running regular workshop sessions at 'Room at the Top', a tuition centre for pregnant schoolgirls in Lambeth.
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It is hoped that funding will soon become available to allow Catherine to run a four session RTM series at the CoramYoung Parents Project.
We are also actively pursuing other possible settings for Read to Me workshops in the London area.
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Catherine Whitehead trained as a primary school teacher in England and has taught in schools in both London and New York City. She has three children and always loved reading stories to them when they were small. Her love of children’s books led her to recently complete an MA in Children’s Literature at Roehampton University in London.
Contact: catherine@readtome.org.uk |
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