Language and Literacy Help in Preschool Pays Off
High achievement and accolades marked the conclusion of a three-year Early Reading First grant from the US Department of Education. Community Services for Children’s program, called LEARN, incorporated research-based methods to assist preschool children in Head Start for whom English is a second language to improve their language and early literacy development. Lehigh University partnered with CSC to evaluate the effectiveness of the program during preschool and followed the children through kindergarten and first grade.
The Head Start children in seven LEARN classrooms outperformed their peers in matched classrooms in numerous key measures including naming letters, knowing letter sounds, rhyming, and understanding syllables. Parents attended special literacy activities in which children and adults read together and learned fun activities to support and promote lite4acy, such as reading together, telling and acting out stories, and creating related crafts. Parents noted significant changes in their home literacy: increased reading at home between parent and child, increased adult reading, parents helping children learn to write letters, increased visits to the library and bookstore, and parents helping children to rhyme.
The Lehigh University assessment of students during elementary school found that the LEARN students began kindergarten with higher skills and with less overall risk than students who did not participate. The research found that LEARN students began first grade also at a higher level than the non LEARN students having remained level in skills over the summer.
Literacy by third grade is considered the benchmark for school achievement. In some states, literacy rate in third grade is used to project the number of prison beds that will be needed in future years.
Head Start/Early Head Start of the Lehigh Valley are programs of Community Services for Children (CSC), a regional leader in early education, touching the lives of 40,000 children annually. ###