题型：阅读理解 题类：常考题 难易度：困难
福建省厦门市2019届高三上学期英语期末考试试卷
It is irrefutable: Parents, who talk to, read and engage with their very young children as often as possible, help them build literacy (读写能力) skills at an early age.
Also certain: Parents of very young children usually have to do a lot of laundry. And low-income families tend to bring their kids with them to public laundromats (洗衣房).
Those truths appear once a week at select neighborhood laundromats in Chicago. That's when librarians lay down colorful mats and oversized board books beside the industrial washing machines.
Inside one of about 14 laundromats in the city's low-income neighborhoods, the librarians gather all available children for Laundromats Story Time (LST), a Chicago Public Library (CPL) program.
With the noise of the washers and dryers, anywhere between a handful to more than a dozen children hear stories, sing songs and play games designed to help their brains develop. The event also aims to instruct parents on how to repeat the experience for their kids, working to raise poor literacy rates in underserved communities.
"We read books, we sing songs, we do plays," says Becca Ruidl, the CPL's STEAM Team early learning manager, who runs the LST program. "We kind of keep it going so parents can walk in adn join in at any time. But a big part of what we do is model literacy skills for parents so they can do it at home with their kids."
While a laundromat seems an unlikely place to engage with children, "we really wanted to meet people in the community where they're. "Ruidl says.
And it clearly meets a need: Library officials say the program is in increasing demand, while Ruidl says families have adjusted their household's laundry day to suit the librarians' laundromat visits. At the same time, LST's co-sponsors—including a laundry industry trade group and Libraries Without Borders, an organization fighting poverty through literacy—have worked with the CPL to draft an instruction handbook to help expand the concept to other U.S. cities.
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