Reach Out and Read

A world where families read to their children every day is one in which our youngest learners have better opportunities for success in school and in life. Through Reach Out and Read—Texas, part of the Children’s Learning Institute at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, we cultivate the relationship between parents and pediatric health care providers to help young children develop essential early literacy skills that will enable them to achieve their full potential. Helping children achieve this potential is central to our mission at the Children’s Learning Institute, and we are excited to help make this a reality through literacy.

Through Reach Out and Read—Texas, part of the national Reach Out and Read program, we work with health providers across our state to integrate language-rich interactions into pediatric care and provide families of all backgrounds with tools to give children a strong start to life. This sends a ripple throughout our communities, strengthening our society and helping combat the effects of income inequality.

The Reach Out and Read model

Doctors, nurse practitioners, and other health care professionals incorporate our program's evidence-based, three-part model into regular pediatric checkups for children beginning in infancy and continuing through 5 years of age, with a special emphasis on children growing up in low-income communities.

• Our affiliated doctors and nurses speak with parents about the importance of reading aloud to their children, starting in infancy.
• At each regular checkup, children ages 6 months through 5 years receive a new book to take home.
• Many of our program sites have literacy-rich environments that include gently-used books for use in waiting rooms, and in some waiting rooms, volunteers help teach parents techniques for reading aloud to young children.

Impact on families and communities

Through our program, parents become more engaged and read to their children more often at home, accelerating language development. Last year, 34,000 pediatric clinicians affiliated with our national Reach Out and Read program served 4.8 million children and shared 7.4 million books at 6,400 program sites around the country. Through Reach Out and Read—Texas, more than 950 participating providers have served over 300,000 children and distributed more than 250,000 books.

Help our youngest learners achieve their full potential

A defining element of Reach Out and Read—Texas is the distribution of books to parents and children to promote language skills and a love for reading at home. Your support can help provide children in our communities with the books and resources that will propel them on a path to success in their educational journeys. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt learning environments, your generosity ensures our littlest learners still have opportunities to achieve their full potential. 

Here are some examples of how your gift can make a difference for children and families through Reach Out and Read—Texas:

• Your contribution of $10 could provide five books to a child.
• Your contribution of $25 could fund a home library for a family, which encourages them to incorporate literacy into their daily lives.
• Your contribution of $100 could fund training for pediatric providers to better impact the families they serve.
• Your contribution of $250 could help expand the Reach Out and Read program to begin earlier at newborn visits, making an even greater difference starting from birth. Incorporating the five additional well-child checkups into our core model will significantly increase the dose of our intervention at a time when families are most receptive to setting up new routines and when foundational patterns of engagement are established.
• Your contribution of $500 could help launch a new Reach Out and Read program in a clinic, providing extensive training for medical providers and clinic staff, literacy materials for parents and new books for even more children!

We are deeply grateful for friends such as you who help us instill a lifelong love of reading and learning in children and families in our communities. Thank you for joining the Children’s Learning Institute and Reach Out and Read—Texas as we launch children, families, and communities on the path to success.