By Amy Baskin

Director of community ed and marketing

Talk — Read — Sing! Three simple words that can change the world. Just as babies learn to sit up, crawl and walk, learning to read begins well before kindergarten. In fact, learning to read begins at birth with families at home through words they hear.

The Austin Literacy Initiative (ALI) is a partnership of community organizations that share a common message.

—Talk to your children

—Read to your children

—Sing to your children

Research shows that as early as 18 months in age there is a word gap between children from professional families and children in poverty. By age 3 that gap can widen to 30 million! Yes 30 million! According to a research study conducted by Betty Hart and Todd Risley, in four years an average child in a professional family accumulates experience with almost 45 million words, an average child in a working-class family 26 million words and an average child in a welfare family 13 million words. Furthermore the research showed that this gap follows the children into elementary school and that vocabulary use at age 3 is equally predictive of measures of language skills at ages 9 and 10. Vocabulary use at age 3 is also strongly associated with reading comprehension scores.

Talk, Read, Sing is simple. Talk a lot to your children. Point out and name everything you see. Ask questions and listen to your children’s responses. Read to your children. Hold your babies in your laps, let your toddlers hold and explore books, point to the words when you read with your preschooler. Ask questions about what your child thinks will happen in the book. Read the same stories over and over again. Sing by listening to music and singing along. Sing lullabies, nursery rhymes, finger plays and make up silly songs. Sing instructions to your children when it is time to clean up or time for dinner. Make everything a song. By increasing the words heard by all children we can reduce the word gap for our children and increase literacy skills and educational success.

The Austin Literacy Initiative is committed to reducing the word gap in our community. We are doing it by making books available and providing opportunities to increase the amount of talking, reading and singing done in all families.

The first week in April will be designated as literacy week in Austin. We begin on April 2 from 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m. at the Austin Public Library. Saturday Stories with Matchbox Children’s Theatre is an event that will feature actors from the Matchbox play reading in costume to children and families. We will also have music and other family activities.

We want to challenge every person in Austin to talk, read and sing more especially to children they know. Together we can change the world for our youngest citizens.