Education Week - January 21, 2015 - 15

ate access to new parents, allowing
them to deliver the message early
enough in a child's development for
it to make a difference.
While the research is clear that
children who know more words
when they start kindergarten are
better off academically, an understanding
of how to ensure they
know enough words is still emerging.
Adding a few more minutes
of doctors' time and a tote bag of
goodies to one of the 12 regularly
scheduled well-baby visits before a
child turns 3 is just one attempt to
remedy the problem.
"Is it the polio vaccine? No," said
Crystal Gariano, the program assistant
for the new effort at the
Oakland clinic. "Is it just as important?
Yes."
The book Anselmo was chewing
on was one object in the tote bag
parents in the participating clinics
will now receive. Also inside was a
baby blanket printed with the message,
"Let's talk about bedtime," and
prompts like, "Let's read a bedtime
story." An infant bodysuit with similar
language, a "Sesame Street" cd
of "silly songs," and some handouts
explaining early brain development
were included as well.
Much of the program was paid
for with a $3.5 million donation
from private funders Marc Benioff,
the founder and ceo of Salesforce.
com, a global cloud computing
company based in San Francisco,
and his philanthropist wife, Lynne
Benioff. Additional donations for
the program have come in from the
George Kaiser Family Foundation,
the Bay Area Council, and others.
The messaging-which can also
"
It's such a simple
thing. If [parents]
appreciated the
value of it, they
would do it."
DR. BERT LUPIN
UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital
be found on billboards and at bus
stops throughout Oakland-was
coordinated by the organizations
collaborating on Too Small To Fail,
primarily the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea
Clinton Foundation and Next
Generation, a San Francisco nonprofit
focused on early learning
and climate change.
In a companion undertaking,
Oaklandish, the local retailer that
designed the blankets and clothing
in the tote bags, is selling them
online in hopes that its trendy clientele
will buy them for their own
children. When they do, Oaklandish
will donate a matching item to a
family at the clinic, thereby privately
funding the distribution of
the items to families in need.
The Tulsa campaign, meanwhile,
is being spearheaded by the religious
community. In that city, a
group of pastors with weekly access
to nearly 14,000 families there
have taken up the talk-read-sing
Palmira Miller holds her
daughter, Isabelle, at a
wellness checkup with
nurse Tesfa Gemechu at
UCSF Benioff Children's
Hospital in Oakland, Calif.
They are accompanied
by Isabelle's half-sister,
Mayah, 3. A project at the
hospital promotes the
value of reading, talking,
and singing to young
children.
mantle alongside their medical
brethren. In addition to working
the message into their weekly sermons,
pastors at several churches
have started family nights for
their parishioners focused on
teaching parents not just to read
to their children, but to read with
them the way a preschool teacher
might. That means pausing to ask
their children questions about the
story or to count the windows in an
illustration of a house.
Counting Words
In Providence, researchers are
conducting a randomized study
that involves electronic counters to
measure the number of words children
hear on a daily basis, as well
as support for the families. Some
of the 81 families in the study are
simply using devices to keep track of
the number of words they exchange
with their children, while others
are getting support to help them
increase the quantity and quality of
those words.
In Camden, N.J., efforts involve
exposing children to books as early
and often as possible with bookgiveaways
at local family centers
and through a Head Start program.
Huntsville, Ala., officials have
started holding parent-child group
meetings focused on encouraging
talking and reading.
And in Chicago, another study is
underway which begins offering support
and education to women mere
hours after they first become mothers-right
in the maternity ward.
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a psychology
professor at Temple University in
Philadelphia, said that while talking
to toddlers is important, too
much emphasis on "filling a gap" in
vocabulary could lead to the belief
that just raining words down on a
child is enough to build language.
Ms. Hirsh-Pasek was the lead author
of a study that found higherquality
parent-child interactions at
age 2-in which parents ask children
questions, for example, instead
of just talking at them-were more
proficient at age 3.
"It goes way deeper than language,"
Ms. Hirsh-Pasek said. "Children
are not going to be ready [for
school by age 5] if we don't build
relationships between adults and
children early."
Dr. Long and her team in Oakland
seem to have received that message.
"Our focus here at Children's is
to really look at the social determinants
of health-where a child
eats, sleeps, plays, prays, and goes
to school," Dr. Long said. "It's about
building resilience."
Early language and the steppingstone
to education it provides is "inextricably
linked to health," she said.
The Oakland team hopes to enroll
500 to 1,000 families in its
talk, read, sing program this year
by handing out the tote bags at
two-month and 18-month checkups
and asking families to participate
in a series of surveys to determine
what they know about brain development
and how, if at all, the
information and tools they receive
at the hospital change their level of
knowledge or their behavior.
"It's such a simple thing," said Dr.
Bert Lubin, the hospital's ceo and a
champion of the program. "If [parents]
appreciated the value of it,
they would do it."
Lillian Mongeau co-writes
Education Week's Early Years blog
and covers California education
for The Hechinger Report.
Coverage of school climate and
student behavior and engagement
is supported in part by grants
from the Atlantic Philanthropies,
the NoVo Foundation, the Raikes
Foundation, and the California
Endowment. Education Week
retains sole editorial control
over the content of this
coverage.
where
past & present
create the
future
"My work is concerned with improving student
learning using basic principles from cognitive and
developmental psychology. By examining forms of
knowledge such as history and mathematics, my
research informs basic theories about learning
and memory, and also has clear applications for
classroom practice."
- Lisa Fazio, Assistant Professor of Psychology
and Human Development
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Education Week - January 21, 2015

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