The following information is brought to you courtesy of Iris’s Community Partners program. Click here to learn more about Community Partners.
Helping your child get off to a good start with their development can have long-term effects on their future success. At Iris Family Support Center, we want to help you ensure your child is meeting their developmental milestones. Click on the photos the photo below that matches your child’s age range to see the important milestones and when your child should be reaching them.
Need help with your child’s development?
Iris Family Support Center’s Community Partners is here to help families with whatever they are facing. Whether you need access to local programs, help obtaining the resources your families needs to succeed, or just a comforting person to talk to, Community Partners can help you find solutions.
The Importance of Reading on Development
If children are read to daily by a parent (or foster, step, or grandparent) long before kindergarten—ideally even before the age of three—they are far more likely to succeed in school. When parents engage with their children through attentive and loving conversations and reading, it boosts the children's language development and prepares them for reading. Using a wide range of words, interacting verbally, and enjoying shared reading routines helps children build the foundational literacy skills they need.
Reading on a parent’s lap, sharing picture books, and enjoying bedtime stories before the age of three provide key elements for later reading success:
Associating books with joy, fun, and love.
Gaining an understanding of how books function and what reading entails.
Being exposed to thousands more words than they would otherwise encounter, which greatly expands their listening vocabulary.
Being introduced to a broad array of topics and ideas through the illustrations in picture books.
Children who enter kindergarten with these early literacy experiences are prepared to learn. They are more likely to be reading at grade level by third grade and to continue succeeding academically.
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Iris's Read To Me program helps connect young readers to books they'll love and get to keep forever. This is a free program that Iris offers to its clients.
If you are already a client of Iris's Community Partners or Healthy Families programs and would like to participate in Read To Me, please contract your Iris worker to learn more.
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Your local library is a great resource for finding books to enjoy with your child and most libraries are free to residents of the area the library serves.
