Supporting parents who want to give their child the best environment at home for developing language and early reading skills is the Early Reading Together ® Programme.
Get funding for your service to provide the programme
In 2023 and 2024 funding for early childhood services providing the Early Reading Together® programme is available from the Ministry of Education.
Families taking part will also receive sets of books to take home to read with their children and practice the strategies they learned from the workshops.
Tell your service manager about this amazing and most valuable opportunity.
Applications for funding are now open. Email [email protected] to find out more and apply.
About Early Reading Together
The Early Reading Together® programme has a sound basis in research and practice. The NZ Ministry of Education and the Office of Early Childhood Education both validate its quality. It has had amazing results over several decades in helping children to develop a love of language and reading for school success and success in life.
Early childhood centres and home-based agencies that provide the programme are those that recognise that parents play a major role in influencing children’s learning outcomes.
The programme involves parents attending 3 short workshops of 1 hour and 15 minutes spread over 3 weeks. At these workshops parents have opportunity to find out how learning language and reading seems from a child’s point-of-view and what they can do to best help their child.
Participation in the programme is open to all parents and caregivers and does not depend on a parent’s reading ability, language, culture, or socio-economic background.
It is a friendly and enjoyable programme that is very manageable for ECE services to provide and enable parents to obtain the right information and insights for enhancing their child’s language and early reading development.
Early Reading Together® is:
- designed to enhance the support which parents/whānau provide for their children’s language and literacy development
- a programme comprising 3 workshops over 3 weeks (each workshop lasts 1 hour and 15 minutes)
- designed to support families from diverse language/literacy, cultural, educational and socio-economic backgrounds
- practical, user friendly, enjoyable and manageable
- effective when it is implemented as described in the fully-scripted Workshop Leader’s Handbook
- based on a sound theoretical and research framework.
Early Reading Together® helps parents to:
- Understand more fully the ways in which talking with young children and reading to them (from the time they are babies) helps the child’s language and literacy development
- Explore additional ways of supporting children’s language and reading development when they are reading stories and rhymes, and singing songs together
- Find out more about books, rhymes and songs which are suitable for young children and enjoyable for them
- Borrow books and other resources from libraries, and access support from librarians.
Go to the ERT® website for more information and to order your Kit if this has not been funded through the Ministry of Education.
