Pilot program improves reading skills No Child Left Behind effort unique in Maine

BELFAST – Jennifer Lagerbom knew her 4-year-old son, Charlie, was getting a lot out of his Early Reading First program.

He had been showing an increased interest in reading and writing, often spending his free time copying words from his favorite storybooks onto a piece of paper.

But even she was impressed one day when he pointed to ellipses – those three dots between words that indicate an incomplete statement – and told her, “it means that the sentence isn’t over yet.”

“I was blown away,” said Lagerbom of Belfast. “I’m college-educated, and I didn’t know that’s what it was called.”

The 4-year-old’s understanding of punctuation is the result of Early Reading First’s emphasis on every aspect of literacy, including vocabulary, the alphabet, syllables, rhyming and even features of books such as the title and dedication pages.

Created through the federal education reform law, No Child Left Behind, Early Reading First programs across the country aim to address the growing concern that many children begin kindergarten without the proper foundational skills to succeed.

The Early Reading First project in Belfast, called the Alphabet Soup Curriculum, was established in 2003 by Waldo County Preschool & Family Services as one of 30 pilot programs in the nation – and the only one in New England – to receive a $2 million No Child Left Behind grant.

About 60 more programs have been established nationwide since 2003. The Belfast area Early Reading First project remains the only one in Maine but has expanded to include 4-year-old preschool classrooms in SAD 3 (Unity), SAD 34 (Belfast) and SAD 56 (Searsport).

With help from a variety of consultants, Waldo County Preschool & Family Services developed its Early Reading First project by taking a well-known national early childhood curriculum and enhancing it, adapting it to local kindergarten expectations as well as to the Maine Learning Results academic standards.

The program introduces literacy skills to very young children “in a playful, imaginative way,” teacher Jana Howard said. “So they’re learning in a fun way without realizing they’re learning.”

Howard weaves literacy skills throughout the children’s preschool activities and experiences so that reading and writing become a natural part of their daily experience. The children aren’t even aware they’re being exposed to oral and written language, say supporters of the program.

“The children aren’t really focused on the fact that they are learning, although they are proud of what they know and the skills they have. Their focus is primarily that they are having fun,” said Drew Sullivan, project director of the preschool program.

The idea is not to teach preschool children to read but to prepare them to learn to read once they reach kindergarten, according to Early Reading First educators.

Recent studies by the Center for Research and Evaluation at the University of Maine indicate that children in the Waldo County Preschool project have dramatically improved their literacy skills, said Sullivan.

When the literacy skills of 147 children entering the Early Reading First program were assessed in the fall of 2003, their average score was behind what one would expect for children that age. Six months later, those children had, on average, caught up to or exceeded the expectations for children that age.

Recent data show even more improvement. In the fall of 2004, 115 children entering the early reading program were tested and, as a group, were found to have lower than average reading skills. But when they were re-tested in the spring of 2005, they had caught up or even exceeded those children from the first group. The second year’s data showed a 100 percent improvement in overall pre-reading skills.

The results are even more remarkable given that 46 percent of children in Early Reading First have been diagnosed as having special needs, and 50 percent are from low-income families. That puts them at risk of being behind in literacy skills, said Sullivan.

While the No Child Left Behind grant ends in December, Waldo County Preschool & Family Services plans to re- apply and expand the program to reach more children and families, she said.