Tucker Joins The ARF Team! Animals + Reading = Fun!

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Tucker's business card![/caption]From rescue dog to reading dog!Tucker and I are excited to be participating in this program at the downtown Main Library in Santa Barbara.As the daughter of a librarian, life-long reader, and book store proprietress; the capacity to read is like oxygen to me. That Tucker and I might breath oxygen into a child's reading experience is better than bliss on a bun.If you are a literacy advocate, follow the link below for more information to learn how to enrich the life of a child through this program which is also in the schools.“I feel relaxed when I am reading to a dog because I am having fun,” one child told researchers. “The dogs don’t care if you read really, really bad so you just keep going,” said another.ARF! is an innovative literacy program that gives students in grades K-6 an opportunity to improve their reading skills and inspire them to become life-long readers by reading aloud to specially trained therapy dogs. ARF! is the only program of its kind in Santa Barbara that provides an evidence-based literacy program utilizing therapy dog teams in a classroom setting.Research has shown that children who read to dogs dramatically increase their reading and comprehension skills. In two separate studies at the University of California at Davis, researchers found that children who read to dogs increased their reading fluency by 12 percent and 30 percent, respectively.For more information: http://allforanimals.org/arf/ARF! is a program of All for Animals, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that is dedicated to creating a compassionate world for animals and children through humane education and literacy programs that nurture the human-animal bond.