Its Never Too Early

Nancy Grasmick, Maryland's superintendent of schools, has reason to worry. Forty-nine percent of the state's 55,000 kindergartners 'start school not fully ready to learn' to read, she says. According to the state's social agencies, far too many kids come from homes with neither books nor adults to read to them.

'So much of a child's development takes place before the age of five, and the community's formal education structure has very little contact with the child during that time,' explains Harriet Henderson, director of the Montgomery County (MD) Public Libraries (MCPL). To become successful learners, education researchers say, children from birth on need to hear stories and play with words. They need to chant, rhyme, and sing. Young children also need caring adults who will introduce them to fundamental shapes, colors, and concepts, such as 'above' and 'inside.' In short, children need to be exposed to language, and lots of it. And they need to receive that exposure before they enter kindergarten. Henderson and her colleagues in It's Never Too Early hope to demonstrate to both the educational community and the public the vital role that libraries can play in early childhood education.

In 1998, Henderson, along with Kathleen Reif, director of the Wicomico (MD) Public Library, and Stephanie Shauck, a youth services consultant for the Maryland State Department of Education, decided that libraries needed to spread the word about the importance of language development and early literacy skills to a broader audience. The trio was especially interested in attracting those who seldom visit the library, particularly low-income parents of preschoolers and childcare workers. Henderson and crew worked with the Maryland Department of Library Services to enlist all of the state's public library systems. Together, they started modestly, with $170,000 from a federal Library Services and Technology Act grant, and began reaching out to home-based childcare centers, Head Start programs, and other agencies that serve children and parents. The librarians and volunteers, most of whom are retired teachers, offered book collections, and presented storytime programs and other language-rich activities.

Librarians also received special training in the use of the Maryland Model for School Readiness Work Sampling System, a preliteracy assessment tool that measures kids' basic language competencies. The assessment model, which is widely used in kindergartens throughout the state by Maryland's Department of Education, looks at six key 'literacy indicators,' or predictors of future reading prowess, and offers ideas for activities that adults can use to strengthen children's listening, speaking, prereading, and writing skills.

Librarians across the state have tailored It's Never Too Early to fit the needs of their communities. Saroj Ghoting, the early childhood services coordinator for Montgomery County Public Library, presents early literacy workshops to parents and caregivers throughout the county. Immediately adjacent to Washington, D.C., Montgomery County has a very diverse population, and Ghoting and Maria de la Cruz of MCPL's Spanish outreach services department offer workshops for Latino parents throughout the year.

Ghoting knows the challenges of working with nontraditional library users. 'We can't simply translate materials from English to Spanish,' she says. 'Maria helps convert materials into Spanish versions that work much better with these parents.' Ghoting gives an example: a Spanish-speaking mother with whom they worked didn't know any English nursery rhymes and, says Ghoting, 'didn't recite Spanish rhymes for her child because she thought her baby should hear English rhymes.' Ghoting and de la Cruz modeled both English and Spanish rhymes, and along the way gently let the mother know that sharing both would help her child become bilingual and bicultural. Exposure to more than one language through songs and stories also helps young children become increasingly aware of phonemes, the sounds and syllables that are the building blocks of spoken and written language. Children aware of how phonemes form words-for example, those aware that 'cowboy' and 'toenail' are made up of smaller words-will have an easier time learning to read.

Many Maryland librarians also began setting aside special areas in their own libraries for parents and young children. Carroll County Public Library, for example, has created in each of its five branches a 'Library Discovery Zone'-an area designed to attract at-risk parents and their children. The zones are bright and colorful, and offer computers with learning-game software. Each one is staffed with personnel who have been trained to make sure that using the library is a pleasant experience for both parents and kids.

At the same time as It's Never Too Early was finding its feet, another literacy-skills effort was percolating on the national level. The Public Library Association (PLA) had appointed a task force, co-chaired by Henderson, to review its preschool literacy practices. Based on the task force's recommendations, in 2000 PLA hired Grover Whitehurst of the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Christopher Lonigan of Florida State University, Tallahassee, two well-known researchers in the field of emergent literacy, to develop a model public library program for parents and caregivers. When the results of the project came in, it became clear that public librarians needed to change how they served young children.

While lapsit programs, toddler times, storytimes, and other children's programming are worth doing, concluded Whitehurst and Lonigan, librarians should focus on teaching language-enrichment games and activities to the adults who interact with young children on a daily basis. To help that happen, the researchers developed 'scripts'-a curriculum of written lessons for librarians to present to parents and caregivers-that target three age groups: pre-talkers-infants and toddlers under 24 months; talkers-two- and three-year-olds; and pre-readers-four- and five-year-olds. During the past year, PLA has fine-tuned and distributed these scripts to libraries nationwide.

With both the Johns Hopkins training and the PLA scripts under their belts, Maryland library staff have developed an ambitious mix of new programs and services. An example of one of the successful pre-talkers' programs is the Baltimore County Public Library's (BCPL) 'Baby Boosters' series. Since few neighborhood parents bring their newborns to the library, BCPL's librarians regularly visit postpartum support groups at a nearby hospital, as well as infant-toddler care groups and 'moms' group' meetings at the local community center. These traveling librarians share the results of recent cognitive brain research and demonstrate how reading, rhyming, and singing can stimulate the language centers of the developing brain.

'We encourage librarians to sing to the parents and babies,' says Hillary Doherty, BCPL's family literacy program coordinator. Many parents don't sing to their young children, explains Doherty, so it's up to the sometimes-reluctant librarians to show them how it's done. Doherty oversees a regular schedule of Baby Boosters programs in branches throughout the system that feature board books, finger plays, stretching exercises, songs, and information about the library and its upcoming events. With babies and toddlers looking on, the librarians present a brief storytime using oversized versions of picture books, and accompany the reading with rhymes and songs. At the conclusion of each session, parents receive a free board book, donated by book distributor Baker & Taylor.

Since Doherty wanted to reach as many childcare agencies as possible, she and BCPL's other children's librarians did something that she acknowledges wasn't easy: they made a lot of cold calls to every agency in the county that had anything at all to do with birth and parenting. Those calls have paid off big time. 'Now we go to infant-toddler programs, moms' groups, PTAs, prenatal classes, and postpartum support groups at local hospitals,' says Doherty. 'We present preliteracy-skills trainings to groups of childcare staff people and preschool teachers.' Since Baby Boosters began in December 2000, it has reached 12,000 children and parents.

Although It's Never Too Early is off to a promising start, challenges remain. What's missing, of course, is proof that Maryland's ambitious program helps kids succeed once they reach kindergarten. Right now, says the state Department of Education's Shauck, there are no plans to conduct a study of that magnitude due to the cost, as well as the difficulty of tracking those preschoolers whose parents relocate within the state.

But help may be on the way from PLA. Virginia Walter, an associate professor at UCLA's Graduate School of Library and Information Science, is now evaluating more than 20 of PLA's emergent literacy workshops-some of which are part of Maryland's It's Never Too Early program. The goal of Walter's evaluation will be to see if parents and caregivers are actually using the language-development activities they have been taught.

Despite the lack of empirical proof, Shauck feels the program has already accomplished one essential thing: public librarians are learning the lingo of education-terms like 'assessment' and 'indicator,' for example. 'We can't yet say that libraries make the difference [in terms of helping kids learn to read more easily],' she admits, 'but it makes a difference that we're using the same language that educators use. It gives us entrée into the schools.' Maryland's public librarians and educators have never been closer, says Shauck. 'We're being taken seriously now as partners.'