Early Literacy Outreach - Every Child Ready to Read

About the Program

Category: Libraries (Best in Category)

Year: 2015

The Catawba County Library expanded our early literacy outreach with a project to provide early literacy programming in local daycares, as well as Every Child Ready to Read training to primary caregivers. We collaborated with the Catawba County Partnership for Children (CCPC) and the NC Cooperative Extension of Catawba County to deliver workshops and identify childcare centers that would most benefit from this project. The library delivered workshops to parents, teachers and community groups to teach about the importance of early literacy and demonstrate practical methods for engaging preschoolers. The outreach specialist provided story time programs to area childcare centers with regular bi-weekly visits to ten centers located in lower socio-economic neighborhoods. Additionally, the outreach specialist taught digital literacy using Kindle Fire™tablets and early literacy applications. To date the outreach specialist has reached 239 caregivers through workshops where participants expressed a renewed energy in teaching early literacy and were excited to learn new ways to incorporate early literacy into their daily routines. The outreach specialist modeled 118 story time programs presented to nearly 2,000 children. In post assessments these children demonstrated improved digital literacy and were more engaged in learning. The CCPC coordinated paperwork allowing workshop attendees to receive continuing education units for participating.