Supporting Early Learning Takes a Community

The Foundation for Early Learning is delighted to feature a guest blog post from Judy Nelson from Pierce County Library, a member of the Early Learning Public Library Partnership.

If you are interested in being featured in the Foundation's blog, please contact Joel Ballezza, Communications Manager at joel@earlylearning.org.

The Foundation for Early Learning recently awarded three new grants to grassroots early learning coalitions in Gray's Harbor, Kittitas and Whitman Counties. This means that the Foundation now supports early learning community coalitions in every county in Washington State.

That is an amazing statement.

It also represents a great deal of work on the ground…lots of folks trying to create effective systems in their communities to build stronger systems  and eliminate redundancy. Lots of silo-smashing in other words. I’m constantly reminded about how hard it is to break down these silos (think the K-12 system) and when it comes to public libraries’ role in supporting early learning we tend to be pigeonholed into the literacy domain of the State Early Learning Benchmarks. In case you have forgotten what the five domains are in the Early Learning Benchmarks, I’ll list them:

• Physical Well-being, Health and Motor skills development,
• Social and emotional development,
• Approaches toward learning,
• Cognition and general knowledge
• Language, communication and literacy

We know nothing is ever quite so tidy, so it surprises folks when we offer support in all five domains.  I’m always keeping my eyes open for new ways to demonstrate our support to “early learning” and not just early literacy.  Recently, I found out we can use math and science to do it! (If you are keeping track, math and science come directly under the “Cognition and General Knowledge” domain, and the “Approaches toward Learning” domain because they foster curiosity and interest.) 

This past month, I attended the Conference on Early Learning at the UW. Dr Elham Kazemi and her co-presenter, Adrian Cunard gave a program on engaging young children’s mathematical thinking by “mathematizing” the world, a term none of us had ever heard before. The presentation started with the notion that math is a critical skill for young children and we don’t do enough of it with young children.  They wanted everyone to commit to counting everything, all the time with young children. What I found so fascinating was how these mathematicians and early learning experts identified games and activities that developed those six pre-reading skills we all know and can recite by heart. Here are a couple of their examples. They talked about teaching children vocabulary around math all the while you are getting them to count. They suggested using words about speed limits, weather and recipes, just to name a few. Then they suggested talking about name and symbol relationships; asking questions like what’s on a street sign, or how do you read a digital clock….hmmmm this sounded like print awareness to me. Another game they shared they called “mathematizing” picture books. Here, they described asking children to talk about the number of pages in the book they were reading, or verbally identifying the page number at the bottom of the page, if there was one.  The speakers also asked questions about how many objects were on a particular page sorted by color or shape. They encouraged parents and care givers to choose books that were non-fiction and had countable objects on their pages. My notes said “dialogic reading skills?”. And finally they encouraged everyone to have the children record what they were counting, starting with just tallying the items and working their way up to writing down questions about those mathematized picture books they were reading.  Reading, writing….math…it’s all connected! 

So I said math and science didn’t I? Well, I spoke with the two educators after their presentation and they were pleasantly surprised that there were librarians in attendance at this conference, and that we offered classes in the six pre-reading skills through a program we called "Every Child Ready to Read" at your library. They were even more interested when I shared the fact that librarians were participating in something called “What’s the BIG Idea?” a project on making math and science come alive for children and families in the library. You may not have heard about this project yet….it is going on across the state right now under the auspices of our State Library. The work was created by the Vermont Center for the Book in its Mother Goose Programs and paid for by the National Science Foundation. So the program comes with great credentials, and is based on the idea that stories are a powerful way to introduce math and science to children, and our storytimes lend themselves to discussions of math and science concepts in a fun engaging way.  Who knew? All facetiousness aside….over these past eight to 10 years of working with early literacy trainings we know that research has been one of the best ways for us to let our communities see the many ways we support families. I was glad I was able to attend this conference as a librarian, and happier to be able to share what we as librarians are doing to support the benchmarks.  I love being able to surprise people and we keep doing that. 

If you would like to see the PowerPoints from the conference, visit the UW Early Learning Conference webpage.

If you want to learn more about the “What’s the BIG Idea” project, please contact Martha Shinners at the State Library (or check with libraries around you who may be executing this grant.  I have two great librarians involved who would be happy to talk with you).