“Read to your kiddos, read to the neighbors kiddos, read to your nieces and your nephews, all of that.“

Lauren Campbell

“Read to your kiddos, read to the neighbors kiddos, read to your nieces and your nephews, all of that.”

-Lauren Campbell

Today’s guest is Lauren Campbell, the Community Programming Coordinator at Ready Readers. Lauren sit down with Staci to discuss the importance of early childhood literacy, tips for parents to help boost their kiddo’s literacy skills, and the book desert of St. Louis.

• Introduction
  • Lauren Campbell is the Community Programming Coordinator at Ready Readers
  • She was an educator for 7 years, teaching middle school math
    
• K-12 education
  • Grew up right here in the West End neighborhood of St. Louis
  • Went to Cathedral, which is now closed.
  • Went to High School at Rosati-Kain
  • Degree from the wonderful Harris–Stowe State University
    
• What is Ready Readers?
  • Ready Readers is an early literacy nonprofit, and the mission is to increase access to literacy for low income families.
  • We do that through building relationships that’s through our weekly storytime program
  • Ready Readers provides field trips for the kiddos there, literacy based field trips for the kiddos there
  • my job, which is just to find ways to connect the community outside of classrooms with literacy. 
    
• So why is early exposure to literacy important?
  • Literacy is important because it’s literally the gateway to everything. You can’t really do much if you can’t read and write. There’s all these statistics that show that if kiddos are not able to read proficiently and confidently by third grade, that can literally change the trajectory of their whole entire life
  • It can be just as simple as reading a street sign, reading a restaurant menu, to using learning because you know how to read all the way up to incarceration rates
  • It’s important that all children have equitable access to resources to learn, to become confident readers, to find the joy in reading, to find the joy and imagination and the fun in books, and to just give them the opportunity to live their best life.
    
• I read a statistic recently that says something like one in six adults don’t read, proficiency are almost effectively illiterate. And what do you think leads to that? And what are the challenges that are put on the education system to kind of create those things, those statistics in 2023?
  • Some people don’t recognize the magnitude and the importance of starting early with literacy.
  • It’s also an access thing. We assume books are easy to get, but for some, they’re not.
  • People assume books are easy to get, but they’re really not. They’re expensive. We also know representation matters. So there are a lot of books that don’t represent a diverse population.
  • Kids want and need to see people in books that look like them.
    
• How do you source the content and materials that you guys share with the students? And then do you guys also carry culturally or socially relevant themes in your books that you share with families?
  • Ready Readers has given out over a million books now
  • All throughout the year, we are sourcing and looking for books that represent the populations that we serve
  • Ready Readers provide team story time and discussions
    
• When you are sourcing that content and materials, what are some of those key relatability factors that you guys are looking for to help kids find themselves in the characters?
  • Especially for the little kiddos, they may be starting kindergarten, starting pre K, so Ready Readers tries to pick relatable experiences to what they’re going through.
  • It can be simple topics like going to the dentist
    
• What age are kids supposed to start learning? How early can a kid start reading?
  • Kids can start learning and reading at the very beginning.
  • When they’re still baking in the belly, get out the books and read to them then. 
  • The earlier you teach kids that this is a good thing, this is fun, this can take you places, this can inspire you, this can affirm you
    
• So what tips or tricks do you guys have to help parents get their kids interested in analog reading?
  • so it’s just something as simple as even if we can’t figure out what the words are yet, let’s just look at the pictures
  • ou tell me what you think is going on here, let’s just make up a story as we go
  • Simply turning the page, which I didn’t realize again, until I got this job, is like a thing, like the kids have to learn how to do
  • “Folks got to go to the store all the time, right? So when you’re going to the store, you could just pick out like, okay, let’s do a letter of the day. Today’s letter is L. See if you can find all the cereal boxes with an L on it, something like that.” 
  • Buying books about different cultures and different countries
    
• Talk to us about the work that you do with the schools through Ready Readers and why that’s important or challenges that make this partnership possible.
  • Our biggest program is our story time program
  • Ready Readers is in over a thousand classrooms
  • Once a week for about 30 minutes, they go into these classrooms all over St. Louis and do a 30 minutes story time with the kids
  • Throughout that school year, they get a book, a brand new book the kids do to take home
  • The teachers also will get a packet with extension activities and just kind of some fun, easy things that they can do related to the book with the kiddos as well. 
  • We partner with some other organizations, for example, like St. Louis Symphony, where we’re able to provide field trips to some of our sites for the kids to go
    
• How do parents and community members get involved with your work and other things that you do?
  • we just promote the importance of literacy. 
  • “Read to your kiddos, read to the neighbors kiddos, read to your nieces and your nephews, all of that. So just read to the kids and just spread the word about how important it is to read to kids and how important literacy is. “
  • We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel or we want to just work with folks that are already doing work, already working with families
  • We are always looking for more volunteers. And again, it’s a 30 minutes commitment a week. Again, you go and you read to the kiddos the same time every week
    
• What is Neighborhood Reading Captains?
  • they celebrate the joy and power of literacy with their neighbors by sharing experiences and resources with families.
  • it’s literally just neighbors helping neighbors with literacy but then also other resources
  • we have chosen to recruit and compensate community members to kind of be that reading champion for their neighborhood
  • if that is having a vendor table at a back to school event and passing out books, then we’ll support our captains in doing that.
  • If they want to host a story time in the park or at the barbershop or at the laundromat, we’ll support them with getting books. 
    
• What does it mean to be a book desert?
  • Basically there’s not enough books in homes in the greater St. Louis area. So having like a hundred books in your home, in your at home library is kind of like the benchmark of what’s enough to have and there are just not enough homes like that here in St. Louis
  • So St. Louis is a book desert.
    
• How do I find you?
  • ReadyReaders.org
  • Ready Readers on Facebook and Instagram as well