Computer Project to Boost Reading Skills in La Colonia

Intent on giving children in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods a head start on learning to read, a nonprofit organization is launching a literacy program in La Colonia, complete with computer software that sings the alphabet song.

Organizers of El Centrito de La Colonia, a social service and cultural center that serves the predominantly Latino working-class neighborhood, said something needed to be done to create an equal playing field for youngsters there.

“In upper- and middle-class families, they’ll do a lot of reading for their kids,” said Jesus Rocha, co-founder of the center that helped create the program. “The college-educated will read to kids, and the parents will have libraries. The working-class family doesn’t, and they don’t always have books at home or specifically go out to shop for books. [Their] main need is for survival.”

In addition, many of the parents speak Spanish at home, often making reading in English more of a challenge during the early grades, Rocha said. By the time the neighborhood students attend school, most fall short of the reading skills that children in middle- or upper-class neighborhoods have acquired, organizers said.

In order to solve this problem, the center used more than $200,000 in grant money and joined forces with the Waterford Institute, a Salt Lake City-based group that tries to create equal educational opportunities through the use of technology.

Dustin Heuston, the institute’s chairman, along with his team of educators and computer specialists, created a software program designed to provide skills needed for successful reading.

The program, tested in public schools in New York and Utah, will also be distributed by Microsoft for home use in the spring.

One of its features is to provide colorful graphics and sounds to teach kids how to pronounce the letters of the alphabet and recognize words.

For instance, on the computer monitor a group of cartoon ants sings the A-B-C song while carrying off goodies, such as sausages and oranges, each marked with a letter of the alphabet.

“We need to teach the alphabet to the point of absolute madness so it’s automatic; they don’t have to think about it,” Heuston said.

There are 19 versions of the A-B-C song, many tailored to different ethnicities. A popular one used in New York features a Caribbean song, while another uses an African American performer to sing a soulful version.

In addition to working on the computer program, children will take books and videos home, and spend time listening to their parents read. If the parents can’t read, organizers will encourage them to make up a story while looking at the pictures in the books.

“An important part of the program is working with parents,” Rocha said. “We emphasize that if people come home from work late, tired and make dinner and do household chores, that it’s still important for their child to be read to at night so the value of reading seeps in.”

Every school that has used the program has shown an increase in reading performance, Heuston said.

In a school in Lower Manhattan, where on the average four out of 28 children learned to read by the end of kindergarten, the numbers jumped to 14 out of 28 after the school used the program.

Their success was repeated in a public school in Harlem, where one out of 25 students were learning to read by the end of kindergarten. By the end of the program, 10 out of 25 learned to read.

The program was made possible with grants totaling $206,000, which came mostly from the James Irvine Foundation and the Ventura County Community Foundation.

A team of experts from Cal Lutheran University will evaluate the program once it starts in January by studying how well the children are learning to read, what role the parents play and whether children who don’t take the program are doing as well as those who do.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

FYI

Parents interested in the early literacy program may call Heide Estrada at 483-4824. The program will start in January and run for three consecutive 12-week sessions, five days a week. Each class lasts an hour and 15 minutes, with 15 minutes on the computer.