Preschool Experiment Gets Children Ready to Read

There’s not much to read on the 2300 block of Carpenter Street, where Hassan Upshur travels every day to day care. In the windows of row houses, “For Sale” signs have long since given way to plywood. No lettering marks the idle warehouse where candy was made for decades. The only sign that learning ever took place here is a rusting teacher’s desk, visible through the blown-out windows of an abandoned school.

But inside the Jane D. Kent-St. Nicholas Daycare Center on this block, 3-year-old Hassan is hunched over his favorite book, the childhood classic “Where the Wild Things Are,” by Maurice Sendak. Hassan and a gaggle of 3-year-olds have lunged at a visitor brandishing the new book, imploring her to read it. And now Hassan, alone at last with his prize, is reading it himself.

Well, not reading, exactly. He is flipping the pages of the storybook, jabbing his little finger hard at Sendak’s witty monsters. He’s carrying on a running commentary on the action--the wild things “dancing in the trees,” the sea monster breathing fire at the little boy in the boat. “It’s scary!” says Hassan. “I like scary books!”

In the sometimes tortured parlance of the teaching profession, Hassan is engaged in a “literacy activity.” He is building “preliteracy skills.” He is, in simple English, getting ready to read.

But there is nothing simple about what Hassan is doing. Or where he is doing it. Or when.

On this bleak street, at this struggling day-care center, at this age, it is a near-miracle that Hassan Upshur would have a book in his hands at all. That he does has taken a major shift in the thinking of teaching professionals about when reading skills should be taught, and a growing recognition that if poor children are to be spared a lifetime of reading difficulties, intervention must start early.

And it has taken a program called Books Aloud, a bold literacy experiment that first introduced Hassan Upshur to the power and pleasure of reading.

Three years ago, using $2.5 million put up by the Philadelphia-based William Penn Foundation, the Books Aloud program showered more than 89,000 brand-new storybooks on some 17,675 preschoolers scattered in day-care centers and family child-care homes all around Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley.

In a single month, 325 day-care centers and 250 family child-care homes--all of them serving mostly low-income populations, some of them without a book in sight--were flooded with sturdy board books, beautiful picture books, books that rhymed and counted and told stories. All of them came with slobber-proof covers, Books Aloud bookplates and a promise from the program to help fix up the books after they’d been gummed and pawed and ripped and loved to the point of falling apart.

“It felt like Christmas morning,” remembers Ann Boyle, the director of the Jane D. Kent-St. Nicholas Daycare Center. “We had always bought books a few at a time, and even then, it would shoot the budget for glue and scissors and construction paper. But we got boxes and boxes of them and were able to give them to the kids by the armful instead of one at a time.”

But the books came with something else that distinguished this program from “book floods” tried with limited success in other places. Day-care providers that wanted the books--at a rate of five per child--had to come to workshops and learn how to read stories in ways that engage youngsters, how to equip children as young as 2 to get ready to read on their own, and how to make books and story reading a constant presence in their everyday activities, not just a “fill-in” activity wedged between, say, arts and crafts and nap time.

To reinforce those lessons, the Books Aloud program dispatched a small army of foot soldiers across the Delaware Valley to help day-care providers set up reading corners and display the new books in ways that enticed children to use them, play with them and read them. At the beginning of the experiment, just 20% of the classrooms had a book corner--although 30% had TVs. By the end of the program, virtually all of the 325 centers and 250 child-care homes had a special book corner, with kid-size display cases provided by Books Aloud.

In two years of intensive visits that followed, trainers like Fernanda Molino and Jean Byrne encountered child-care workers who hustled the new books out of children’s reach in the belief that they were too precious to let children play with. Molino and Byrne met some who simply didn’t see the point of exposing babies to books when they obviously couldn’t read. They heard some workers protest that they didn’t read well aloud--a face-saving cover for the more humiliating admission that they barely read at all. And they found some so focused on teaching preschoolers the alphabet that they had no time--and no patience--for indulgences like storybooks.

To all, Molino repeated the trainers’ mantra: “Put books in children’s hands,” she urged, whether it was potty time, free-play time or nap time. Read them stories and let them chew on and play with and touch the books and see the pictures and print. Put the storybooks’ characters and letters and words all around them, at their level.

If you do, Molino would assure the skeptics, the kids will turn to the books again and again, like toys. They will learn that words tell stories, she’d explain. They will begin to recognize letters and sounds, she’d say. And piece by piece, without even seeming to try, she’d say, they will build a foundation for literacy.

Like Hassan Upshur, they will be getting ready to read.

The Books Aloud program was perhaps most remarkable for the principal audience it chose to target: low-income children in day-care centers and the child-care workers, many of whom also struggle with poverty and reading problems, who shepherd them through days that stretch sometimes from before dawn to past dinner time. In doing so, the Books Aloud program departed from a central feature of the bulk of the literacy programs out there: a focus on getting parents to read to their children.

“We knew that these kids spend more waking hours at child-care centers than they did with their families,” said Dick Cox, the now-retired vice president of the William Penn Foundation who conceived and helped launch Books Aloud. “And we figured that if we could get those teachers trained in the use of printed material, then perhaps kids would get excited about books and would take them home to parents.”

Program Designers Saw Difficult Task

In designing Books Aloud, philanthropists like Cox knew they had their work cut out for them. Literacy studies have consistently shown that from the earliest days of grade school, poor, urban, black and Latino children are much more likely to read poorly than white, suburban, middle-class children. As they get older, they are likely to fall further and further behind.

Beneath those bleak findings lie even more startling statistics. A landmark 1990 study found that although a typical middle-class child arrives at kindergarten with about 1,000 hours of being read to, his or her low-income neighbor averages just 25 hours. A 1986 study found that in neighborhoods where children had low achievement, 60% of kindergartners did not own a single book.

In Philadelphia’s low-income neighborhoods, such statistics were the stuff of everyday life. Among the more than 12,000 Philadelphians affected by Books Aloud in its first year, about 1 in 4 initially had library cards. (Today, about 3 in 4 do.)

Hassan appears a little luckier than most. His mother, 26-year-old Dana Jackson, loved being read to as a child. She kept many of her own favorite books from childhood, and has heeded her mother’s frequent admonitions to “just read him a book!”

But Jackson, a single mother who works long hours as a hospital technician, says she sees many homes with no books at all. She says she often tells friends with young children what her own mother told her: “Just read the child a book!”

Three years after Books Aloud was launched, it has closed its books; its readers have moved on to teaching or library jobs. But day-care providers say their efforts are still producing results.

In an independent assessment of the program conducted in the two years after its launch, Temple University education professor Susan Neuman found that, compared to a similar group of children not affected by the program, Books Aloud youngsters performed significantly better in four of six critical measures of reading readiness. By the second year, Neuman found that their performance improved in one key pre-reading skill where poor children tend to fall most persistently behind: the ability to understand a wide range of vocabulary words.

“Storybook reading has legs,” Neuman said in an interview. You would expect, she added, that children exposed more to storybooks would improve their ability to tell and recount stories. But the book-reading also gave them an edge over non-Books Aloud children when it came to recognizing letters, understanding the conventions of print (that text, not pictures, tells the story, for example, and that print moves from left to right), and grasping early-writing skills.

“Storybook reading brings together children’s oral and written language. It puts it all in context for the kids,” Neuman said. “Why should I be interested in a letter? Because if I can identify these letters, I can read this great book! It gives them both an incentive and a road map for how to get there. I’m afraid if you don’t have that foundation, written language becomes nonsense, it becomes gibberish . . . there’s no hook.”

Researchers have recognized for some time that the path to reading success is a step-by-step process. But only recently, with the explosion of research on babies’ intellectual growth and brain development, have they come to recognize how early a child begins down that path.

And only recently have those on the front lines of early childhood education clearly accepted researchers’ findings and begun translating them into lesson plans.

In recent months, two documents have signaled this important shift.

The first came last March, when a panel of nationally recognized educators released a comprehensive study called Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children. Produced under the imprimatur of the respected National Research Council, the report was widely hailed for calling a truce between two warring camps in the reading world--those arguing that grade-schoolers should be taught to read by sounding out words--phonics--and those who believe that children learn best by recognizing words and their meanings in context, or through “whole language.” Teachers, the study found, should use elements of both.

Less heralded was the National Research Council’s declaration that educators and parents should begin teaching literacy skills--and heading off reading difficulties--well before a child hits kindergarten. Children 3 and 4 years old should be surrounded by books to help motivate them for the task of learning to read, the experts said. And playing with language sounds--singing songs, making up rhymes, engaging in wordplay and telling stories--introduces children to the relationship between sounds and letters.

Not only did the study authors identify pre-reading accomplishments that 3- and 4-year-olds should master; they even identified milestones that babies, from birth to 3 years old, should reach on their path to literacy. (Among them: recognizing a specific book by its cover, pretending to read books, and understanding such book-reading conventions as turning the pages.)

In May of this year, two crucial groups of teachers took the next step, beginning to translate the new consensus on reading into real-life lessons for preschoolers. The two groups were the National Assn. for the Education of Young Children, the premier accrediting organization for the nation’s preschools, and the International Reading Assn., the largest professional association of reading instructors.

Their joint statement essentially declared a truce in the two groups’ long-simmering feud over whether and what reading skills preschoolers should be taught, and how.

The statement acknowledged that many preschool teachers still cling to the view that children are not intellectually ready, at 3 or 4, to be exposed to reading and writing, and that any effort to do so is wasted or, worse, counterproductive. For those who insist that preschool must be about play and socialization alone, the statement cautioned that “failing to give children literacy experiences until they are school age can severely

limit the reading and writing levels they ultimately attain.”

At the same time, it acknowledged that the teaching tools that reading teachers have sworn by with older children--”skill and drill” methods like workbooks and flashcards--aren’t right for preschoolers. Instead, the two groups urged preschool teachers to provide “print-rich environments” (for instance, labeling everyday items in the classroom, putting up signs and posters and drawing up make-believe grocery lists), to read storybooks daily to individual children and small groups, and to sing songs, make rhymes and use wordplay with children.

Learning What It Feels Like to Learn

But if a child’s path to literacy is lined with stimulating storybooks and familiar signs on street corners, experts say that there is no substitute for attentive and enthusiastic guides pointing out the signposts.

Where Hassan Upshur once had one guide--his mother--Books Aloud has assured that he now has two. Darlene Stevens, a social worker turned preschool teacher, presides over an unimaginably rambunctious classroom of 13 boys and one girl--all 3 and 4 years old.

Since Books Aloud, said Stevens, book-reading has become more than a segment in a day crowded with physical activity. It has become a point of departure for questions and conversation--something that many of her charges get little of with struggling parents. It has become a key to unlock for her preschoolers the unending mysteries of how things work. In the act of turning pages gently and slowing down to gaze at pictures, highly physical children like Hassan have learned, literally, what it feels like to learn, Stevens said.

And inside children like Hassan, she added, books have lit a fire much different than the seething rage she sees in older boys who hang on the corners of streets like Carpenter.

“You really can’t teach a person to have enthusiasm or motivation to learn,” Stevens said. “But if I give them a love of reading, their natural aggressiveness to keep at it will take them far--farther than anything else I can do for them. I give them a fighting chance. They may not go but so far. But they’ll go further than they would have gone had I not done this.”

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