When is the last time you had 120 minutes of uninterrupted time to do anything? Can you imagine how much you could accomplish in that two hours?

Young students in Concordia Parish are accomplishing great things in their two hours as they work to improve their reading skills.

Under a grant-funded program called Reading First, students in kindergarten through third grade have a chance to spend more time reading and working with special tutors to help boost their skills.

The program aims to bring parish schools in line with federal regulations handed down in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

But federal regulations or not, the reading program is a great way to instill in children the importance of reading.

So many of us take that skill for granted, but reading simply isn’t a given &045; many adults, unfortunately, have slipped through the cracks and must cope every day without knowing how to read.

But reading is such an important part of a child’s learning every day. According to one statistic, the top achieving 5 percent of students read 144 times better than the bottom achieving 5 percent.

Programs like Reading First can help close that gap.

We encourage parents who want to know more about the program and encourage their children’s reading skills at home to contact their students’ teachers and administrators.

We’ll bet they can spare some uninterrupted time at home doing the same thing.