Early literacy – First 10

Getting Started with First 10: Community Partnerships, School Hubs, and Work Currently Underway (Post #3)

York City prekindergarten teacher, Allie Feaser, sharing York’s new city-wide transition to kindergarten child information form with prekindergarten and kindergarten teachers at the First 10 Summer Institute in August, 2021. Allie spearheaded the creation of the form working with prekindergarten principal Julie Fabie and the First 10 Transition to Kindergarten team.

The second post in this series showed how First 10 partnerships are funded, how they are advancing equity by using this funding to support urban and rural communities with significant low-income populations, and how some partnerships are combining First 10 with anti-racism efforts. In this post, I discuss how communities get started with First 10. I describe the two structures—community-wide partnerships and school-based hubs—First 10 partnerships employ to carry out their work, how they form teams, and how they begin their planning efforts.

Community-wide and School-based First 10 Structures, Sometimes in Combination

The First 10 initiative in York City, PA is a good example of a comprehensive First 10 community partnership (see Figure 1 below). York City is a district of approximately 6100 students, 91% are students of color, and 95% are low-income. The First 10 initiative spans the entire city. First 10 is overseen by a steering committee that includes a board member/parent representative and senior leaders from the district, several early childhood programs, the library, local funders, and other nonprofit organizations. York is forming a family advisory committee to allow for more direct community representation, and importantly, the school district is pairing its First 10 work with a major racial equity and cultural competence training push. At the beginning of the pandemic it established several First 10 teams to carry out a number of strategies that impact the entire community:

Join Us Thursday: Partnerships for the Whole Child (Panelists Posted)

I’m looking forward to moderating the first webinar in our 4-part series, School-Community Partnerships for the Whole Child this Thursday at 4:00 ET. Please join us as we learn about:

Boston’s innovative PreK – 2nd Grade curriculum, coaching, and professional learning model and its collaboration with community-based preschools,
The district-wide use of non-evaluative classroom observation tools to improve teaching and learning in the early grades in Lansing, MI, and
Woonsocket, RI’s transition to kindergarten partnership and its city-wide approach to social-emotional learning in preK and kindergarten classrooms.

The panelists for the first two webinars are posted here, and the remaining panelists will be posted soon.

Campaign for Grade Level Reading Webinar: First 10 School and Community Partnerships

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The Campaign for Grade Level Reading is holding a webinar on First 10 School and Community Partnerships on October 8 from 3:00–4:30 ET.. Please join me, Cris Lopez Anderson (Buffett Early Childhood Institute), and Brooke Chilton-Timmons (Multnomah County Department of Human Services) to learn about the exciting work happening in these communities.

You can find the registration link below, and here is an invitation from Cris that went out in the Campaign’s newsletter:

I’m excited to invite you to join me for a webinar highlighting the First 10 Schools and Communities model that is promoting collaborations between school districts and the early learning and family support fields to promote early school success. Please join us on Oct. 8, from 3–4:30 p.m. ET to learn about this model and how it is being implemented in two Grade Level Reading (GLR) communities — Omaha, Nebraska, and Multnomah County, Oregon.

First 10 schools and communities are forging partnerships with families and organizations to reach children long before they arrive at kindergarten. In Greater Omaha, the Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska is providing technical assistance to 11 school districts as they promote schools as community hubs to support families and children from birth through third grade. We will also learn how county leaders in Multnomah County, Oregon, are promoting community schools and early engagement with young children and families.

REGISTER

I hope you will join me and my co-presenters as we discuss this promising model and explore the potential connections with GLR coalitions.

Reading Aloud to Young Children Has Benefits for Behavior and Attention

“It’s a truism in child development that the very young learn through relationships and back-and-forth interactions, including the interactions that occur when parents read to their children. A new study provides evidence of just how sustained an impact reading and playing with young children can have, shaping their social and emotional development in ways that go far beyond helping them learn language and early literacy skills. The parent-child-book moment even has the potential to help curb problem behaviors like aggression, hyperactivity and difficulty with attention, a new study has found.

‘We think of reading in lots of different ways, but I don’t know that we think of reading this way,’ said Dr. Alan Mendelsohn, an associate professor of pediatrics at New York University School of Medicine, who is the principal investigator of the study, ‘Reading Aloud, Play and Social-Emotional Development,’ published in the journal Pediatrics.”

How to Get Your Mind to Read (Willingham, NYT)

The Merits of Reading Real Books to Your Children

How do we think about a distinct role for paper, for “book-books” in children’s lives? My own pediatric cause is literacy promotion for young children. I am the national medical director of the program Reach Out and Read, which follows a model of talking with the parents of babies, toddlers and preschoolers about the importance of reading aloud, and giving away a developmentally appropriate children’s book at every checkup.

We are talking about very young children here, and we begin by giving out board books which are designed to be chewed and drooled on by babies who are still exploring the world orally, or thrown down (repeatedly) off the high chair by young children who are just figuring out object permanence and experimenting with ways to train their parents to fetch and retrieve. But the most essential attribute of those board books, beyond their durability, is that they pull in the parent, not only to pick them up, but to ask and answer questions, name the pictures, make the animal noises.

NY Times: https://go.edc.org/g302

Why Handwriting Is Still Essential in the Keyboard Age

Do children in a keyboard world need to learn old-fashioned handwriting?

There is a tendency to dismiss handwriting as a nonessential skill, even though researchers have warned that learning to write may be the key to, well, learning to write.

And beyond the emotional connection adults may feel to the way we learned to write, there is a growing body of research on what the normally developing brain learns by forming letters on the page, in printed or manuscript format as well as in cursive.

New York Times: http://goo.gl/RZqcvF

Kindergarten Readiness Begins Early in New Bedford (Eye on Early Education)