Sisters Read Bedtime Stories to Promote Literacy

Reading can sometimes be a luxury

Zaria and Hailey are using social media to read books to other kids. More than 60% of low-income families have no children’s books in their homes according to the Department of Education. Since February 2019, the Willards have been using Facebook Live and Instagram to read to kids all over the world. They want to use social media to draw attention to global child literacy and lack of access to education. By the time they’re 3, children from lower-income families are exposed to 30 million fewer words than kids from affluent families based on data from the Department of Education.

“Well we've been reading bedtime story kids all over the world on Facebook live. We read Monday through Friday 8:00 p.m. Eastern and Saturday sometimes we do book reviews. Their parents might be raking, and I are risking any time or be too busy to you get a bedtime story or during General. Well knowing that they can't get a story or can read they don't have access to books. That's really sad. But we're going to change that. Sometimes people think social media or electronics are bad, but you can use it in a good way. We usually go to the library and we pick books and we like to treat books with lots of diversity in it, so every kid can see themselves in a book. It's good to read stories. They give information, knowledge comes from reading; it's not just on the Internet. Before the Internet, it was in books,” Zaria Willard explains.

Their mother Victoria also shared that it's been a good way for the girls, who are currently working on authoring their own children’s series, to stay busy and occupied. That’s true not only during summer vacation, but when their father, who's in the Navy, is gone for weeks at a time. Zaria and Hailey don’t care about where the children that tune into their reading sessions come from — just that they feel heard and represented.

Brut.