Parents are working on children's literacy

Conference: More people are interested in children's 'emergent' skills.

Mike Bowler | Education Beat

June 10, 2001

IDIDN'T KNOW there was a Maryland Week of the Working Parent - has been for a dozen years - until I was asked to participate in one of the week's events, a "community conference" on early literacy Thursday.

Nor did I know the breadth of the informal network of those with an interest in what children know - or should know - about reading and writing before they learn to do either.

There, in from the morning rain at a Timonium hotel, were the day care providers and numerous members and leaders of the Maryland Committee for Children, sponsors of the week and of the conference. Also in attendance were curious parents, a scattering of nurses and pediatricians, corporate leaders, public and school librarians, teachers, professors, the state schools superintendent, education researchers and Head Start workers.

Mike Bowler Recent columns

Seems more and more people are interested these days in what the librarians call "emergent literacy."

That's the literacy that develops on the laps of parents, though children aren't "taught" to read in those early years. Vocabulary begins accumulating at birth, the experts tell us, and grows steadily. Most 2-year-olds have vocabularies of 300 to 500 words, and they begin formal schooling three years later knowing between 3,000 and 5,000 words.

Many of these words represent the things around babies and toddlers. "Children must master the language of things before they master the language of words," said Friedrich Froebel, the 19th-century inventor of kindergarten. Parents and caregivers also can help babies and toddlers develop narrative skills and, eventually, print motivation.

Advice is plentiful, and a good place to start is the library. Maryland's libraries, with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, have issued guides to emergent literacy for each of three developmental stages: pre-talkers, talkers and pre-readers, those 4 and 5 years old.

The library-institute partnership is an encouraging - and telling - one. It brings together the Public Library Association and a federal agency that sees reading as a public health issue and sponsors most of the research on how the brain functions during the act of reading.

Baltimore County public library's "Baby Boosters" program, mentioned in an article here before its launch last summer, has become an excellent source. Parents or child care providers can pick up kits, each containing 23 picture books and two resource books. Program volunteers conduct sessions with parents on the importance of reading and playing with infants.

Perhaps Baby Boosters' most valuable resource is its Web site (www.babyboosters.org), with tips, links to other sources of information about early childhood literacy and lists of resources, many of them free.

The site makes searching easy. Scrolling about, I spotted a book that looked promising, "Baby Signs: How to Talk With Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk." With a couple of clicks, I had the up-to-the-minute status of all 13 copies in the library system.

None of which I would have known but for the Week of the Working Parent.

Bookmobile starts summer with new set of graduates

For eight years, Peter Bradford has been the unofficial summer librarian of West Baltimore. Filling his van - he's gone through four of them - with donated books, the former fourth-grade teacher at Harlem Park Elementary School works the row houses and street corners around Harlem Park and John Eager Howard Elementary, asking nothing for the loan of a book but a book report. Five reports get a kid a day at Oregon Ridge.

Bradford, 36, estimates his bookmobile has 200 alumni, kids he taught at Harlem Park who became patrons of his itinerant library. This month, some of the oldest are becoming alumni in another sense: They're graduating from high school.

Geopardi Bost, who was a 13-year-old middle-schooler when I first looked in on Bradford and his friends four summers ago, graduates today from Carver Vocational-Technical High School. "She got into eight colleges," says Bradford, who's working in an alternative school in Hampden.

Bradford says his bookmobile starts rolling again June 26, but the high school grads won't be helping this summer. "They're too busy getting ready for college."