Thank you for supporting Books@Heart! Funds raised through this page will be used to purchase books for patients at Texas Children's Heart Center. 

Books@Heart is an early childhood literacy and language development initiative started in February 2021 in collaboration with Cardiology, Critical Care, and the Developmental Care teams at the Texas Children’s  Heart Center. Through this program, all infants in the Heart Center receive books, reading guidance, and language development sessions by speech and language pathologists at regular intervals during infancy. The youngest infants benefiting from this program are newborns and receive books and counseling at ages 2months, 4months, 6months, 9months, and 12months, to help build up a library especially for infants admitted to the hospital repeatedly or for long periods of time. The developmental care team follows these patients longitudinally in the hospital and further promote language development. Children receive reading medals for 14 reading sessions and reading trophies for 21 reading sessions, in an effort to encourage reading.

Early language and literacy promotion is an integral part of pediatric and infant care, and includes anticipatory guidance about reading to children and distribution of books. This is associated with sustained increases in parent-child reading practices and access to books, stronger language skills like expressive and receptive vocabulary, better reading comprehension, and stronger IQ scores and school performance. In fact, starting literacy promotion in the first six months of life, starting with distributing books as early as 2 weeks of age, has been shown to increase reading practices in families and improved neurodevelopmental outcomes by 2 years of age. 

Donate Funds: Select the Donate button on this page to provide funds for Books@Heart to purchase books for patients. 

Purchase Books through the our Amazon Wishlist to be delivered directly to Books@Heart (copy and paste link into browser): https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/1031TZL92LGL7?ref_=wl_share

To donate books to Books@Heart, please mail them to:
Texas Children's Hospital
Attn: Volunteer Services - Books@Heart Program
6621 Fannin St, Suite A125
Houston, TX 77030

For more information or questions, please contact: Kriti Puri, MBBS or Amanda Ruth, MD at booksatheart@texaschildrens.org.

Additional Reading Resources:
TCH Library services - https://www.texaschildrens.org/departments/child-life/libraries
upWORDS -https://www.texaschildrens.org/departments/upwords
Reach Out and Read - https://www.reachoutandread.org/