SALT LAKE CITY — Amanda Empey keeps books all over her house. She said it helps get her 6-year-old son, Jude, thinking.
"I always loved to read and that is something that I definitely wanted to pass on to him," the Sugar House mom said. "I want him to have a good foundation from a young age, so that as he gets older and there are more distractions, he will always be able to sit down and learn from a book."
Books and challenging kids to read at least 20 minutes each day is the focus of KUED's 26th Annual Reading Marathon — which runs through November. The organization is asking kids to track their time reading to earn a KUED Kids Adventure Pass, which gives them free access to museums, zoos and activities throughout the state.
"Reading is fundamental to being successful in life in any way," said Liesl Jacobson, children's services coordinator at Salt Lake City Public Library, which hosted the marathon kick-off event on Saturday. "It is one of the most fundamental building blocks to learning."
KUED and a number of community partners invited families to take part in a Planetary Science Blast-Off event, offering variety of learning activities dealing with science, technology, engineering, art and math, to help get kids excited to learn in those high-demand fields.
"We want to get people excited about reading and reinforce the good that it can do both in school and at home," said Elise Brimhall, education coordinator at KUED.
Millie Anderson, 7, said her favorite experience of the day was seeing different chemical reactions at stations put on by Westminster College students associated with the American Chemical Society, which works to advance public understanding of chemistry.
"I didn't know mixing things could do that," the second-grader said. "It was a good, big surprise."
Retired NASA astronaut Scott "Doc" Horowitz was there to answer questions about his job, during which he spent 47 days on four different shuttle missions in space.
"It's very impressive," Horowitz told kids as they asked what space was like. He also said there "might be life out there," as water and ice have been found on planets other than Earth. The former senior executive at Ogden's ATK Thiokol encouraged kids to read and study hard in school.
Jacobson said that when parents get involved in helping kids read, school successes are even better.
"I like to tell parents that they are their child's first and best teacher," she said, adding that fostering a learning environment in the years up to age 5 is essential to successful development.
"The more accustomed they are to learning, the better off a child is when they start school," Jacobson said.
The marathon rules follow research that shows children who read at least 20 minutes a day do better than their peers who read less or not at all on standardized tests. Reading helps to stimulate the brain, promotes speech and language development and stretches the imagination.
Reading also creates an emotional bond between parents and the children to whom they read.
"Because they feel loved, they learn to love reading," Jacobson said.
Last year, Utah kids reported reading more than 2 million minutes in November. More than 3,000 kids participated in the marathon, Brimhall said.
To learn more about the program, visit kued.org/reading.
Reading logs are due by Dec. 15.
Correction: The captions in a previous version incorrectly stated the Planetary Science Blast-Off was a science event hosted by Westminster College. It was a reading event hosted by KUED.