Booktime

Wednesday 9 November marks the official 2011 launch of Booktime, our annual free books programme in association with Booktrust for children starting school in England. This autumn, we're giving 1.38 million books to over 17,000 primary schools across the country, with every 4-5 year old child receiving a special Booktime edition of Puffin's Why Elephant Has a Trunk from the Tinga Tinga Tales® series created by Claudia Lloyd, and Pearson Primary's Face Painting (Rigby Star series) by Monica Hughes. This is the first time that we've put a Pearson UK book in the pack with the Puffin storybook, underlining Booktime's emphasis on both sharing books for pleasure and making learning to read fun too.

It's now six years since the FT's volunteer reading programme in Southwark schools inspired us to create the Booktime Reading Partners scheme - since then we've had an average of 179 Pearson people across six offices spending 3411 hours each year to read with children in local primary schools. Why not do your own bit of shared reading? This year's storybook has been recorded by Lenny Henry - the voice of Elephant in the Tinga Tinga Tales series on CBeebies - and is available to read along with here.

Studies continue to show that reading at home with young children can have a real impact on their future academic achievement, as this OECD PISA paper explains. Research carried out for this year's Booktime programme also found that 72% of teachers attributed developed language skills and more advanced reading levels to those children who regularly read with adults at home. Click here to read the full Booktime press release.

Learn more about Booktime at www.booktime.org.uk. You can also keep up to date by following Booktime on Twitter here and Facebook here.