Every Child Ready to Read Training

"The single most significant factor influencing a child's early educational success is an introduction to books and being read to at home prior to beginning school."
- National Research Council, 2000

Wow, what a session to motivate us! Sue (the trooper!) and I had a terrific time with our Every Child Ready to Read Trainer, Mary Kuehner, from Jefferson County Public Library and the ECRR Grant Coordinator, Patricia Froehlich, from Colorado State Library.

The training entailed:

• The understanding Early Literacy.
• The understanding the Six Early Literacy Skills and how these contribute to skilled reading.
• How to support children's early literacy skill development in storytime.
• The importance of sharing and how to share early literacy information with parents and caregivers.

What's empowering is that we already intuitively do Early Literacy Stroytimes, but now we have new tricks to add to our bags, research and statistics to back up what we do and emphasize how important it is, and a more structured direction for our storytimes.

This blog is set up for the purpose of expanding our knowledge of Early Literacy and enhancing our storytimes around these principals. Sue and I will share what we learned in our training session and the Grand County Youth Services Librarians can promote Early Literacy in each of our storytimes. In communicating, we can share our ideas and experiences with each other regarding Early Literacy storytimes. Hopefully, this will not only promote new ideas, but give a support basis and provide a strong foundation for us to continue community education through our programs.

The information for this blog is provided by the Colorado Libraries for Early Literacy with Colorado State Library for the LSTA Storytime Grant Training Manual & The Discussion Guide of Enhancing Library Storytime with Early Literacy Skills and Messages from the Multnomah County Library.

"By the time they were two years old, the children whose parents had a high level of speech with their children had a vocabulary five times as high as those children whose parents had a low level of speech."
-Huttenlocher, Janellen et. Al. Early Vocabulary Growth: Relations to Language Input and Gender. Developmental Psychology v. 27 no. 2 March 1991