The campaign produced a Children's Reading Kit which was mailed to local Home and School Associations in the fall of 1967. Advice provided here was similar to advice that appeared in Food for Thought, Canadian Home and School, as well as in Parents’ Magazine and Chatelaine.¹⁴ Topics covered the cultural importance of the home book shelf, stating: “It’s this kind of living with books that puts reading on a very personal level. Even a small library can build lifelong friendships with books” (CHSF, 1967). Another sheet encouraged parents to take “joy” and time in helping their children with homework, and to stock their house with appropriate reference books: “Your child’s questions are cause for rejoicing for they show that he or she is thinking. The best thing you can say is, “Let’s look it up” (CHSF, 1967). The advice prescribed the kinds of reference books to buy, and where to place them in the home, the goal being for mothers to “engage the interests of the entire family” (CHSF, 1967). In keeping with the close inter-textual links with the home reading campaigns of their US counterparts in the National Committee for Parents and Teachers, the Canadian Home and School Federation campaign deployed a number of discursive strategies that proved powerful in normalizing literacy acquisition as dependent upon women’s domestic work and their “constant” availability and attention to their children’s learning needs. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, such literacy advice implied not only the regulation of children’s literacy practices, but the regulation of women’s mothering practices as well.

¹⁴ The Reading Kit included the article, What Every Parent Should Know about the Teaching of Reading, by Dr. A.F. Deverell of the University of Saskatchewan, and two pamphlets on the importance of reading aloud to children. Two other brochures were also produced and distributed as part of the project. They were Books for a Family Bookshelf by Helen Robertson, coordinator of children's services in the Winnipeg Public Library, and What Every Parent Should Know about Early Childhood Influences by Professor Alice Borden of the University of British Columbia. Two thousand posters were printed by IBM Canada, and Canadian educational reference-book publishers sponsored the printing of 900,000 copies of the brochure Place a Book in the Hands of your Child.