Reach Out and Read®

At more than ten routine health checkups from infancy through five years, Reach Out and Read® trained providers:

• talk with parents about how important it is to read aloud and engage with their young children
• demonstrate how best to look at books and talk about the stories with their infants, toddlers, and preschoolers
• encourage parents to cuddle up and read together at home and build routines around books
• give a new book to the child to take home and keep

At the end of the program, every child has a home library, each given with the acknowledgment to parents that they are their child’s first and most important teacher.

Thanks to the generosity of the Manatee Community Foundation, Community Foundation of Sarasota County, and The Patterson Foundation, physicians in Manatee and Sarasota have joined this national network of more than 42 affiliates that serve in over 6,400 medical sites in all 50 states.