LEWISTON – In a downtown Head Start classroom, 11 pre-schoolers were enraptured by a book about flowers.

As Betsy Norcross-Plourde read, the 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds oohed and ahhed over the colorful garden. They giggled at the mention of birthday cake and clamored to get a closer look at a picture of a ladybug.

Across town, in a small Child Development Services office, 2-year-old Carolyn Elder looked over a magnetic book of farm animals. She seriously considered the piece in her hand.

Where to put the sheep?

“Good girl!” praised developmental therapist Natalie Hale as Carolyn found a spot on the edge of the page.

Throughout the Lewiston-Auburn area Thursday, pre-schoolers listened to “The Three Bears.” Toddlers took in “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.” Youngsters gathered for “The Little Engine That Could.”

All for the second annual “Read Across L/A. . . 20 Minutes Today” pro-literacy event.

“If you’re reading to your kids before they get to school, they’re so ready to learn everything,” said Norcross-Plourde, who read “Flower Garden” to a Head Start class.

With 70 readers at 70 locations, this year’s event was much larger than last year’s, when 40 to 45 people read. Betty Gundersdorf, director of Lewiston Adult Education, attributed the growth “to a greater awareness of what we’re doing, a greater buy-in from the community.”

This year’s locations included day care centers, pre-schools, and 15 different Head Start classrooms as far north as Turner and Lisbon. The Lewiston Housing Authority, the YMCA and YWCA, Lewiston and Auburn libraries and a pediatrician’s office also offered readings.

Readers included local politicians and members of both Lewiston and Auburn school committees, one Sun Journal editor, Androscoggin Chamber of Commerce President Chip Morrison, Matthew Said of Waldenbooks, and Auburn City Manager Pat Finnegan.

The goal: make people aware of how important it is to read to very young children – and even infants – for at least 20 minutes every day.

Research shows that reading gives children pre-literacy skills they need to be successful when they begin kindergarten, Gundersdorf said. Reading every day “is something people take for granted, but there really is a connection between having that 20 minutes every day to simply have a child hold a book and learn sounds, learn the letters.”

Pre-schoolers familiar with letter sounds, being used to sit still and hear a story, begin school “on par with their peers,” Gundersdorf said.

A lot of parents do read to their pre-schoolers, but the activity can be easy to skip within busy families. Thursday’s reading across Lewiston-Auburn was “to affirm that it’s very powerful, that parents should continue to do it.”

If parents knew how powerful it is, “they’d do it even more,” Gundersdorf said.