A gaggle of preschool-aged kids, many wearing paper Dr. Seuss hats, stormed the Performance Annex stage at the City Heights Weingart Branch Library Sunday, angling for the best spots to listen to a bilingual reading of “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.”
They came with their families to participate in the 5th annual Talk, Read, Sing Day, a popular reading awareness campaign of First Five San Diego, the state program dedicated to promoting the health and well-being of children age 5 and younger.
For the first time this year, the Dr. Seuss Foundation was in the mix, not only showing up to offer crafts and copies of the Seuss classic “Cat in the Hat” but also announcing that it is making a major donation.
Brian Schottlaender, the foundation’s president, announced that the organization will donate more than 10,000 Seuss books to First Five’s First Steps Home Visiting program, an effort that offers a holistic range of services to families.
“This program carries on Dr. Seuss’s own legacy by working to ensure that all young learners have what they need to thrive,” Schottlaender said.
Promoting reading is a core First Five tenet. Alethea Arguilez, executive director of First Five San Diego, said that Talk, Read, Sing is designed to follow the guidance of early child development research which documents the benefits of parents and other caregivers reading to their children daily.
“This is all about engaging parents in conversation and reinforcing how important it is to read a book a day with your little ones and to enjoy songs because it’s all about language development,” Arguilez said. “We want to make sure that everyone knows how important that is, especially if they might not realize that these routine activities are so critical in ing that brain development, that healthy development, of their little one.”
Many research teams have found strong correlations between early reading and success later in life.
A 2015 study published in the medical journal Pediatrics used magnetic resonance imaging to document the brain activity of preschoolers, finding that “greater home reading exposure is positively associated with activation of brain areas ing mental imagery and narrative comprehension.”
And a 2019 piece in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics found that “parents who read one picture book with their children every day provide their children with exposure to an estimated 78,000 words each year.”
“Cumulatively, over the five years before kindergarten entry, we estimate that children from literacy-rich homes hear a cumulative 1.4 million more words during storybook reading than children who are never read to,” the journal article said.
And researchers have found that early reading appears to influence brain development in young children because the neurons that make up their young minds are still “plastic,” allowing the input they receive through their eyes and ears to literally influence how different language centers develop and interconnect.
Samantha Andrade of San Diego brought her 4-year-old daughter, Gabby, to Sunday’s event after coming to the City Heights library to sign her up for a summer reading program. Sunday’s event, she said, was a celebration of reading activities that are going on year-round.
“We do story time at the National City library because it’s closer to where we live, and she loves it because it’s reading and singing together,” Andrade said.
According to its annual report, First Five served more than 52,000 children, parents and caregivers during its 2023-24 fiscal year.
