(Toronto, January 15, 2021) – Tuesday, January 27th is ABC Family Literacy Day in Canada and parents in the Yukon have a special reason to celebrate – on that day Invest in Kids and The Yukon Literacy Coalition, in partnership with The Dollywood Foundation of Canada and the Whitehorse Rendezvous Rotary Club, will launch The Dolly Parton Imagination Library program throughout the entire territory. The Yukon will be the first territory or province in Canada to bring the celebrated international early literacy program to every newborn.
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library program is designed to give children an early start to their learning and development, providing age-appropriate books to encourage reading and language skills. The Canadian program first launched in The Yukon on October 19, 2007, when Invest in Kids, the Whitehorse Rendezvous Rotary Club and The Yukon Literacy Foundation made it available to children in the territory’s rural communities. On the 27th the program will expand to include Whitehorse, opening it up to all newborns in the territory. The expansion is possible due to the generous support of the Yukon Government.
The launch event on the 27th will take place at the Canada Games Centre at 11 a.m. and will feature guest speakers, including David Dotson, President of The Dollywood Foundation, and a special video greeting from Dolly Parton. All Whitehorse children who are 0-12 months old at the time of registration and reside in Whitehorse, Yukon are invited to register.
Each child who registers for the program will receive a free book every month in the mail until their fifth birthday. The program offers a way for parents to connect with their children, support their children’s language development and prepare them for kindergarten.
The Yukon joins a growing number of Canadian communities taking part in the Imagination Library program. Each month children receive books that are carefully selected by a group of experts in education, child development and early childhood literacy, ensuring that the content they read and the illustrations in the books are supporting them appropriately at every stage of their development.
Since November 2006 when Invest in Kids partnered with The Dollywood Foundation of Canada to launch The Imagination Library in Canada, families from communities coast-to-coast in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Newfoundland have had the opportunity to register their child. In March, Nova Scotia became the first province in Canada to offer the program to all First Nations children born in the province and in October the Yukon announced that it was implementing the program across the entire territory, making all newborns eligible to join. In 2008, the program delivered over 5 million hard cover books to over 490,000 children throughout the United States and Canada.
To learn how to start an Imagination Library program in your community, please call The Imagination Library at 1-877-583-KIDS x 293 or visit www.investinkids.ca or www.imaginationlibrary.com.
Invest in Kids is a national charity dedicated to supporting parents in the most important undertaking of their lives – raising a child. Understanding the power of parenting, the critical importance of the first five years and parents’ hopes to be the very best parent they can be, Invest in Kids translates the science of parenting and child development into easy-to-understand resources that strengthen parenting knowledge, skills and confidence and provide practical approaches that have context in today’s world. For additional information visit, www.investinkids.ca.
The Dolly Parton Imagination Library supports children’s language and literacy skills and prepares them for school by gifting every signed-up newborn with a free age-appropriate book a month until the child’s fifth birthday. It helps parents build a positive parent-child relationship through rich sensory exchange as they start reading to their child from early on. Started in the U.S. by Dolly Parton in 1996 in her native Tennessee, the Imagination Library expanded across the States and is currently benefiting more than 480,000 families and their young children. The program has been available in Canada to families with children under five since November 2006, when it was launched by Invest in Kids in partnership with The Dollywood Foundation of Canada. For additional information, visit: www.imaginationlibrary.com or www.investinkids.ca/imaginationlibrary.
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Media Contact:
Krista Lamb
Invest in Kids
Manager, Media Relations and Publicity
1-877-583-5437 or (416) 977-1222 ext. 224