West Valley City • Pediatrician Cindy Gellner enters the exam room and presents her patient a gift and sings him a song.

Both are about "Old MacDonald," and 1-year-old Breyden reaches for the book, grinning with delight.

"I'm surprised he hasn't put it in his mouth yet," says mother Misty Star, holding onto her son.

It's Breyden's birthday, but that's not the cause for celebration. Every child at the University of Utah Westridge Health Center receives a new book at wellness visits from ages 6 months to 5 years.

It's part of the Reach Out and Read program, which promotes early literacy and school readiness in doctors' offices nationwide. Doctors dole out developmentally appropriate books and advise parents about the importance of reading aloud.

"It's to help improve literacy rates and give children a head start in a love of reading," said Gellner, who has been "prescribing" reading to her patients for five years. "Hopefully that turns into a love of learning."

She started Westridge's Reach Out and Read program as soon as she began working at the clinic. As a pediatric resident at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland, she had been trained by the program's co-founder, Robert Needleman.

Even though reading aloud to children is considered the "single most effective thing" parents can do to prepare their children for academic success, more than half of U.S. and Utah children between birth and 5 years were not read to daily, according to a Reach Out and Read study.

Gellner said most of her patients' parents know they should crack a book with their children but say they don't have time. That's why she recommends starting a bedtime routine.

"It doesn't even have to be 20 minutes. If you spend 10 minutes reading a book, that's 10 minutes of parent-child bonding," she said.

Misty Star said she tries to read to Breyden and his big sister Sylvia, 5, every night. Her eldest demands it. As a toddler, Sylvia started receiving books from a different pediatrician at her exams. Misty had wanted to read to her daughter anyway, and the pediatrician's encouragement reinforced her decision.

"I didn't understand why so early. I thought they wouldn't understand because they're so little," Star said.

But she learned that reading even to infants helps them learn language and eventually to read.

According to the Massachusetts organization's website, children in the program scored higher on vocabulary and school readiness assessments; preschoolers were six months developmentally ahead of their peers.

Reach Out and Read emphasizes the program in low-income neighborhoods because studies have shown that poorer children hear 30 million fewer words than their wealthier peers by the time they're 4, setting them back academically.

At Westridge, 80 percent of the patients are on Medicaid, Gellner said. For a lot of children, the books given at the wellness visits are the first ones they own.

"Parents don't have money for the little extras. This is just one little thing we try to do to make their lives better," Gellner said.

Star said she can afford to buy books, but getting free ones helps build her children's library. She hopes her bedtime reading routine creates lifelong bookworms.

Her daughter "asks to read all the time. She has a whole bookshelf full of them. He likes to dig into them, too."

The program was developed in 1989 at what is now Boston Medical Center. It came to Utah in 2007, where there are now 39 programs serving 41,300 children. Nationally, 4,600 programs give 6.4 million books to 3.9 million children a year.

Gellner said she knows the program works by her patients' questions: "They ask for the books," she said. "They realize they don't just come here for shots."