Ventura County Sheriff Jim Fryhoff is reading in Spanish, alongside Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, to children under the age of five at Ruben Castro Center in Moorpark.
It’s part of a bigger First 5 Ventura campaign called Take 5 and Read to Kids! to help raise awareness about the importance of early childhood literacy for the more than 55,000 children in Ventura County. Fryhoff said reading to young children is important to set them up for success.
"In the first few years, children are learning to read. After that, they're reading to learn. So if they don't know how to read, they're going to be missing out after about fourth grade on," said Fryhoff. "So it's really important to have that early childhood literacy, to make sure families are reading books to their children routinely, to make it a habit every day to read a book to your children so that they set them up for success for the future."
Fryhoff added that it's also a good way to build positive relationships between law enforcement and families.
"They need to know they can come to us for help, that we're here to protect them," he said.
At a time when many federally funded early education programs are threatened by closure, Democratic Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin of Thousand Oaks said that it’s critical to expose children to language so they are ready when they go to school.
"It is critically important to have high-quality early education programs so that everybody can start at the starting line when they start their kindergarten year, so it's absolutely appalling to hear that there might be cuts in these very, very critical early education programs," said Irwin.
First 5 is funded at a state level—actually by the tax on tobacco—and Lysa Urban from First 5 Ventura County said investing in the first five years of a child’s life is critical for their social, emotional and learning skills.
"We know that 90% of a child's brain develops before age five. So that's the ideal and best time to make sure we talk, read, and sing with children from birth to age five when they head to kindergarten," said Urban.
"If you will read to them a minimum of five minutes a day, they will have heard 300,000 more words by the time they start kindergarten. And while we are not being directly impacted by the federal cuts, we are impacted by the families that we serve collaboratively, which means that First Five will be working even more so with the same limited resources to support the families throughout Ventura County," she said.
Members of the public with children age 5 and younger are invited to attend Take 5 and Read to Kids! storytimes with a celebrity reader at select First 5 Ventura County Neighborhoods for Learning (NfL) sites as well as local libraries during their regularly scheduled storytimes:
• Rio Plaza Elementary (NfL classroom), 3300 Cortez St., Oxnard, May 2 at 9:30 a.m.
• Ruben Castro Center (NfL classroom), 612 B. Spring Rd. Suite 401, Moorpark, May 2 at 9:30 a.m.
• Sespe Elementary (NfL classroom), 627 Sespe Ave., Fillmore, May 2 at 9:30 a.m.
• E.P. Foster Library on Monday, May 5 at 10:30 a.m.
• Port Hueneme Ray D. Prueter Library on Tuesday, May 6 at 10:30 a.m.
• Fillmore Library on Wednesday, May 7 at 10:30 a.m.
• Hill Road Library on Wednesday, May 7 at 10:30 a.m.
• Ojai Library on Wednesday, May 7 at 10:30 a.m.
• Santa Paula Library/Blanchard Community Library on Wednesday, May 7 at 10:30 a.m.
• Thousand Oaks Brimhall Library on Thursday, May 8 at 10:15 a.m.
• Camarillo Library on Thursday, May 8 at 10:30 a.m.
