How It All Started

In early 2020, my wife came home with a new tote bag and several fliers from our local library. Grinning ear to ear, she told me how she struck up a conversation with a librarian about Cambridge Public Library's (CPL) 1000 Books Before Kindergarten early literacy program and that she had signed us up. This was how it began.

My wife and I had our first child in the fall of 2019 and we were, and still are, eager to find ways to grow his young mind. Further, both my wife and I have been avid readers since we were young, so this particular program wasn't a hard sell. But sell CPL did with its child-cognitive-skills-quote-bait fliers found within the Curious George logo tote bag that mentioned:

Did I mention we were first time parents?

My overeagerness also led me to interpret the program as something different than may have been intended. I assumed the program was to read 1000 unique books with your child as opposed to reading 1000 times with your child before Kindergarten. Yes, I do recognize that this distinction is missing the forest for the trees. I'm certain CPL isn't worried about the exact number of times or books one reads and that its objective in launching the program is to encourage more reading for young children. I wanted to mention this distinction though, to clarify how I interpreted the program and why our goal may be different from that of the program.

And that was it. That's how my wife and I started down the road of attempting to read 1000 unique books with our son before he goes to Kindergarten.

The time at which I'm writing this post though, ~2.5 years have passed since we started the program. You might be wondering, why write now? Well, a few reasons:

1) Lack of book recommendations: Over the past several years, I've noticed that there aren't many resources with the quantity and quality of children's book recommendations that I was hoping for (the irony is not lost on me that this may be due to my interpretation of the goal). I'm see many sites promoting the best 10 or 20 books for x-year olds and the overlap between those recommendations is large. My hope is that this blog can be a source for others who want to attempt the same process to find a larger breadth of books, with more detailed information about quality.

2) Document my experience: I want to put a personal face on what it looks like to actually read 1000 books before Kindergarten. Julie Roach mentioned critical language skills, cognitive skills, curiosity, and confidence. What would that look like for my son? Is it all just hearsay and I should instead have potential future children spend more time in front of the TV? What challenges would we face and how could we overcome them? My experiences will be anecdotal, but I hope it can be a tangible story for others with more details than quotes on fliers.

3) Promote the journey to others: Given I'm writing these posts having done a lot of reading already, I can say that I've found so much enjoyment reading with my son that it's something I hope I can encourage others to do. I'm reminded of when results from clinical drug trials are so overwhelmingly positive that the trial is sometimes ended early so the drug can be provided to all patients. The journey is worth it and I want to engage and learn from others who have been, are, or will be on the same road.

If there's one thing I hope you take away from these posts, it is that reading with my son one has been one of the great joys of life and I believe it could be for you and your children as well.