Reading aloud regularly boosts children’s vocabulary, supports their emotional development and has major influence on their future literacy and school performance.

One’s ability and motivation to read is based on early childhood experiences. The role of parents is especially important during the early years, when the child cannot yet read by themselves. However, reading aloud continues to have a major positive impact on children and young people’s literacy even when they are already literate.

Read Aloud Initiative has been active since 2015.

A Book Bag to Every Baby Born in Finland

At Finnish maternity and child health clinics every baby gets a book bag as a gift. The aim of the book gift is to give equal opportunities for early reading in every family. This program is called Book Bag to Every Baby Born in Finland.

A public health nurse gifts the family a book bag including a rhyme book, a story book, and information on reading for parents, such as a fun growth chart with information on language development at different stages in a child’s life.

The aim of Book Bag to Every Baby Born in Finland is to make reading accessible to all families, regardless their social or economic background. Finnish maternity and child health clinics are free of charge and easy to access across the country. Their services are widely used regardless of social class: 99,4 % of families use these services.

The book gifting program has been active since 2019, having reached up to 250 000 families. The book bag is available in Finnish and Swedish (in 2019–2021 also in three Sámi languages and four minority languages).

Website for professionals and parents

Read Aloud’s webpage contains articles, book tips, videos, and other material to help professionals spread the love of reading and create lasting reading habits to the families.

The Parent’s Guide helps professionals provide information for the parents on the importance of reading to a child, also in one’s native language. The guide is available to print out in more than 20 languages.

Guides for professionals include information on early reading for children’s day care and other fields. In the guide we give recommendations for professionals to encourage parents of small children to read aloud to them.

Reading Path

Reading Path is an easy-to-follow model for teachers to enhance and maintain children’s enthusiasm for reading, at the point when children start to practise technical literacy at school. The three-year Reading Path model takes place at the crossroads of pre-school and the first two years of primary school. The teacher follows a path of six functional tasks per year that foster children’s love of reading. The model is based on the national core curricula for early childhood education and primary education.

In addition to the path of tasks, the model contains extra material for teachers to encourage families to read with their children, to support multilingual children’s reading, and to maintain reading routines in the whole community.

Reading Path was developed in co-operation with teachers in Vantaa, the 4th largest city in Finland with over 100 languages spoken in the classrooms. The model is based on research data, such as early reading habits’ effects to one’s performance in literacy and other skills later in life. Reading Path is a part of the Read Aloud Initiative, since 2023.