Jumpstart's Read for the Record Campaign

Since our first national reading event in 2006, the Pearson Foundation has been a proud sponsor and founding partner of Jumpstart’s Read for the Record.

This annual celebration of reading and learning highlights the need for high quality early education in America by bringing young people and adults together to set a new world record for the most children reading the same book on the same day.

This year, record-breakers will be reading Penguin’s Ladybug Girl and the Bug Squad, by David Soman and Jacky Davis, which has been selected as the official book of Jumpstart’s Read for the Record campaign in 2012.

For the first time this year, Jumpstart’s Read for the Record will take place over a full week—September 27 through to the record setting day on October 4—giving record breakers across the country even more opportunity to read and to support Jumpstart’s mission to work toward the day every child in America enters school prepared to succeed. Again this year, record breakers will also be able to take part by reading the book for free at We Give Books (wegivebooks.org), the free digital reading initiative created by Penguin and the Pearson Foundation.

Last year on October 6, 2011 Read for the Record engaged a record-breaking 2,185,155 people, who read Llama Llama Red Pajama by Anna Dewdney in homes, schools, libraries, community centers, and online at We Give Books. In conjunction with the 2011 campaign, We Give Books also donated more than 200,000 copies of this wonderful book to young people so that they could easily take part in the record-breaking day.

Key to the success of Read for the Record has been the generous support of NBC’s TODAY Show. As in past years, TODAY Show hosts Matt Lauer, Ann Curry, Al Roker and Natalie Morales launched the nationwide effort on the morning of October 6. Leading the reading for the 2011 event on NBC's TODAY Show was Jumpstart's Read for the Record Ambassador Bridget Moynahan, star of the television drama Blue Bloods.

The on-air kickoff was followed by thousands of local reading events across the country – celebrations that included governors, mayors, teachers, parents, and family members, as well as the widespread support of education and literacy organizations including the International Reading Association, National Catholic Educational Association, and National Education Association.

Since the inception of Jumpstart's Read for the Record in 2006, more than seven million young people have taken time to read and be counted as part of the campaign, while Jumpstart has raised more than seven million dollars for its work in preschools throughout the year. During this time, the Pearson Foundation has donated more than 1,000,000 books to young people in conjunction with the Read for the Record Campaign.