• Overview
• Scaling Up Best Practice
• Focused Instruction Process
• Early Childhood
  

Programs

Early Childhood

Parent engagement in helping their children learn at home is an essential component in SLI’s strategy, along with professional development of teachers and shared school leadership. This component is designed to strengthen the skills of parents to more effectively assist their children. The research shows that building a foundation for understanding instructions and learning capacity early in a child’s life can strengthen a child’s academic career and lifetime income.

The Early Childhood Demonstration Model consists of a series of workshops conducted by the SLI parent engagement in the Fall and Spring school semesters.  The workshops are intended for families with children age 3-5.  Each school partners with SLI and plays a significant role in motivating families to attend these workshops, giving children the opportunity to build their capacity for learning and parents the ability to serve as improved home educators.  It gives children (and their family) the opportunity to more easily transition into kindergarten by creating a comfort level with the school environment and staff.  Workshops descriptions have been reviewed by Chicago Public Schools early childhood staff to ensure that home learning complements and reinforces the early childhood school curriculum.  Workshops are based on the Abecedarian Curriculum – Learning Games designed by Drs. Joseph Sparling and Isabelle Lewis, researchers at the University of North Carolina. The workshops are conducted in both Spanish and English.

Twelve fall workshops are two hours each and include these research-based exercises: 

• Mystical Journeys of Learning
• Creativity and the Brain
• Come and Explore
• Having Fun While Reading Aloud
• Fun With Words and Numbers
• Can You Fill In The Blanks?
• Building Your Child’s Literacy & Thinking Skills
• Spoons, Shapes and Guesses
• Reflect and Identify
• Sharing
• Book-A-Mania Library Field Trip.

Ten spring workshops are two hours each and include: 

• Let’s Play
• Show Me and Tell Me
• 1-2-3-4-5
• Do You Know How To Predict
• Telling What I Know
• Let’s Play With Numbers
• Can You Follow Directions?
• Adventures In Your Neighborhood
• Look What I Know
• Sharing.

The Demonstration Phase is based on lessons learned from our Pilot Phase Evaluation completed by staff of the Erickson Institute. The pilot phase was implemented at two Chicago elementary schools located in the Little Village and West Side communities during the 2005-2006 school year. The Evaluation report notes that caregivers attending the workshops who were surveyed showed significant increases in reported frequency of:

• Reading aloud to their children         
• Telling stories with their children
• Taking books everywhere
• Reading in front of their children and
• Keeping a larger number of children’s books at home.