Do you have fond memories of your parents reading to you when you were little?

“Read to me” is a campaign initiated by a group of students from the Wee Kim Wee School of Communications and Information at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) to encourage parents to read to their children on a regular basis. The team embarked on this project after finding out that many Singaporean parents are not reading to their children and hence missing out on its benefits, including the opportunity to spend quality time with their children and develop their children’s social and emotional capacities while broadening their knowledge.

The team organized workshops once a month over the period of January to March 2018 aimed to help parents have effective shared reading sessions with their children. The first workshop with Dr Myra Garces-Bacsal, a National Institute of Education (NIE) Professor, taught parents how to raise their children to be lifelong readers. The second workshop with Author Fleur Vella-Chang and Closetful of Books founder Denise Tan gave insights into how parents can create a culture of books in the family and the power of stories in a child’s developmental years. The third workshop with Charmaine and Jane from the Association of Early Childhood Education Singapore (AECES) discussed daily routines promoting emergent literacy skills and offered practical ideas for developing a lifelong love of reading with children at home.

Reading Challenges were also planned in preschools where parents and their children can engage in mini reading challenges with exciting prizes to be won. These challenges provided a platform for parents and their children to start engaging in shared reading.

In addition, two online videos were released that featured “The Reading Mama” Jenny Lim and “The Reading Dad” Jonathan Goh, both of whom enjoy reading to the little ones in their families. These videos show that both mothers and fathers are capable of reading to their children.

From May 2018, “Read to Me” has been adopted by AECES to continue and expand the campaign into a resource portal for Early Childhood educators, parents, volunteers or anyone who is interested in knowing more about the early years.