An Edge on Youth Literacy
The Promises and Challenges of
Community-Based Programs
Story by Cheryl Howell
Photos by Mark Bell

Literacy Resources

On weekday afternoons during the school year, the media center at the Clarence B. Sabbath Elementary School in River Rouge fills with noisy and rambunctious kindergarten through fifth grade students. After a snack and a few minutes to greet their peers and talk about their day, the students know it’s time to get to work.

“Reading is really enforced,” said Madeline J. Flowers, coordinator of the River Rouge School District’s Opportunity Center, the after-school family literacy program at Sabbath. “At first, most of them were really resistant. They would go ‘ohhhhh’ and complain, but look at them now. They have to spend at least 20 minutes reading each day. We encourage them to read out loud here and at home to their parents and siblings.”

The Sabbath Opportunity Center is one of 38 community-based sites across Michigan where Michigan State University Extension’s 4-H Youth Development programs are helping children build literacy skills. The 4-H Club Read program and other MSU research and outreach initiatives are focused on encouraging schools, communities and families help children build a foundation for a lifetime of reading and writing. Researchers are exploring what models are most effective, and what approaches can best lead to school readiness and positive outcomes for children. This work, alongside the real life experiences of programs like Sabbath's, is identifying the challenges to literacy, like working with parents who can’t read, or with children who live in poverty or are in poor health, and showing that developing strong literacy skills requires active family involvement at all phases of a child’s life – especially from birth through their early school years.

Emergent Literacy
“Emergent literacy is a whole area of research that has been looking at what kids learn about reading and writing before school,” said Victoria Purcell-Gates, MSU professor of education. “There is a great deal of data that shows kids learn a lot about reading and writing before they read and write. But, all of this depends on how much young kids see people reading and writing in their home.”

Sowing the seeds for literacy begins at an early age. Well before they enter school, children learn fundamental concepts that lay the groundwork for reading and writing. Youngsters who have been read to and are exposed to print and written materials in their homes, are more likely to understand that print is a language and symbol system that represents individual sounds, that there are distinctions between oral and written language, and that there are frameworks for syntax and vocabulary.

Most researchers agree that parental involvement is critical not only for developing these emergent literacy skills but also for building a more literate school-age population. To address this intergenerational nature of literacy, the U.S. Department of Education suggests that family literacy programs integrate “interactive literacy activities between parent and child; training in parenting activities; literacy training that leads to economic self-sufficiency and age-appropriate education that prepares children for success in school and life experiences.”

This multi-faceted approach is also recommended and modeled by national groups like the National Center for Family Literacy, which has led the family literacy movement in America. Programs, like the one at Sabbath, tie parent literacy to early child learning—showing parents literacy activities to do at home with their children, and helping parents develop their own literacy and life management skills.

Sabbath is an effort of the Michigan Reading Readiness Project and an MSU Extension 4-H Club Read program, which establishes year-round, in-school and out-of-school tutoring and mentoring literacy programs, staffed by local volunteers and trained Americorps members.

T he goals of 4-H Club Read are to increase children’s literacy skills, build their interest in reading for pleasure across a variety of literary genres and increase the time children spend reading. Parents of children enrolled in programs have opportunities to interact and learn with their child around literacy activities. They can discover ways to improve literacy interaction at home and manage the stress that might prevent them from being involved advocates in their children’s learning.

Cheryl Howell is the MSU Extension Children, Youth and Family Programs Information Officer

For the full feature story, please see page 20 in MSU Connect magazine.
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