In This Issue
Our Newest Program Sites
Upcoming Microlectures
Bridge the Gap
New Bedford Hosts Journey to LIteracy Conference
From the Massachusetts Medical Director
Contact Info for MA
Welcoming Our Newest Program Sites

Brigham and Women's Family Care Associates, Boston

 

UMASS Memorial NICU Followup Clinic, Worcester


Upcoming MIcrolectures
Don't forget to register for upcoming Microlectures on topics such as Using the Book with Toddlers, or Preschool Children....or just Using the Book You Have. For a list of upcoming microlectures through June, click here.  
Reach Out and Read is One of Three Charities Recommended in Nicholas Kristof's New York Times Holiday Giving Guide!
Reach Out and Read was thrilled to be named by Nicholas Kristof in his holiday giving guide in The New York Times!We were thrilled and honored to be on the very short list of incredible organizations he encouraged his readers to support this holiday season...and enormously grateful to the over 1,000 donors who responded!
  
 Bridge the Gap
  
This striking image speaks for itself. For more of Laura's work, visit our Bridge the Gap Facebook page  or contact your Regional Coordinator to find out how to use Laura's images in your own Bridge the Gap campaign.
  
  
Journey to Literacy Conference Held in New Bedford
The fifth in the series of Journey to Literacy conferences presented by Reach Out and Read and the Department of Early Education and Care was held at the Waypoint Conference Center in New Bedford on Saturday November 19.
  
Co-sponsored by the Greater New Bedford Early LIteracy Consortium, the conference highlighted Pam Kuechler, Consortium Chair and President of Massachusetts Head Start, who welcomed over 75 family childcare providers and other early childhood educators. Keynote speakers were Massachusetts Medical Director Marilyn Augustyn MD, and Jean Ciborowski Fahey, PhD, of the South Shore Hospital Reading Partnership.
  
After lunch, attendees were on their feet, enthusiastically participating in a workshop by Liz Buchanan, music educator, on the use of songs and music to develop early literacy skills. Read more about Liz and listen to her songs at  Antelope Dance. 
 
 
click here to see our new website
click here to see our Facebook page
 
   Reach Out and Read New England
        Massachusetts Newsletter  
Winter 2014
 
Serving 194,497 Massachusetts children 
in 288 clinical  locations
  

Dear Reach Out and Read Colleagues, 

 

I hope that your holidays were festive and relaxing, and that your New Year is off to a happy start. As we look back on 2013 we are particularly glad to highlight the many people and organizations who have supported Reach Out and Read Massachusetts, whether with donations, by holding book drives, by giving books and guidance in clinics or practices, or by just taking the time to read to a child.

 

We are especially appreciative of those who responded to our Bridge the Gap campaign--an initiative with a two-fold focus: raising funds to bridge the book gap for Massachusetts Reach Out and Read practices, and enabling them in turn to help bridge the Thirty Million Word Gap first identified by Hart and Risley, and highlighted by a recent study from Stanford. For more about this study, and about the exciting Lena technology that is used to measure the amount of speech a child hears,  see the article below by Reach Out and Read Medical Director,  Marilyn Augustyn MD.

 

 

The concept of the Thirty Million Word Gap is gaining national attention, with programs like the Thirty Million Word initiative in Chicago catching notice of the White House. We were privileged to be aided in our Bridge the Gap drive by graphic designer Laura Crossin, who saw the power of the Thirty Million Words early in her career, and created some of the stunning images that capture the loss  that this gap creates.     

 

Warm Regards,

Alison   

                                                               

 

Alison Corning Clarke, MA, MSW

Massachusetts Programs Director

 
 

Bridging the Gap: Twenty Minutes a Day

 

  
Erin Dobson is the energetic, enthusiastic principal at Tatnuck Magnet School in Worcester.
 
When she became principal at the school she found on her desk an unopened copy of the book The 90% Reading Goal by Lynn Fielding, Nancy Kerr, and Paul Rosier, with a note inside from a member of the school committee. She read the book and embraced the concept, single-handedly beginning a campaign to ensure that every child at the Tatnuk school is  read to for 20 minutes a day.  
 

Erin put yard signs in front of the school, had stickers printed, and talks about the campaign all the time...with her staff, her students, and  parents. Calendars go home with the children so they can document how many minutes they are read to; they then return them to their teachers.

 

The enthusiasm for reading in the school in infectious. For more information about Erin Dobson and her staff at Tatnuck Magnet School in Worcester, or how to start a Twenty Minutes a Day campaign at a school near you, contact Central Massachusetts Regional Coordinator Heather Robinson.
Fundraising Success Stories and Thank You's!
  

 

Brockton Neighborhood Health Center coordinator Alexandra Avedesian and her staff held a year-end fundraiser for their Reach Out and Read program. Staff donated money  and took the magic reindeer dust for their children/loved ones, raising more than $100 on the first day! 

 

 

 

 

 

Many thanks to Dr. Nancy Miller and to the Irene E. and George A. Davis Foundation for their generous support of the Springfield Boys and Girls Club's 13th annual Festival of Trees, and most importantly, for their help bringing our Reach Out and Read inspired tree to life. This year, our tree was brimming with Dr. Seuss board books and Barnes & Noble gift cards!

 

Every year, the trees are displayed at Springfield's Tower Square and raffled off at the end of the festival to raise funds for the Boys and Girls Club. It's a wonderful cause, a great way to get in the holiday spirit, and the perfect opportunity to remind people that there is no greater gift for children than sharing a good book with a loved one. 

 

 

  

                                                                                                                                       
  

Barnes and Noble Burlington has been an invaluable Reach Out and Read partner for the last several years, and is once again donating books to Reach Out and Read during their holiday drive. This year over 3000 new books were donated! Reach Out and Read MA is thrilled to receive so many high quality children's books to help our practices Bridge the Gap!

 

  

Another valued Barnes and Noble partner is B&N Worcester, which held another successful Holiday Book Drive to benefit Reach Out and Read sites within UMASS Memorial.  

 

 

 

Peter Sherman, Store Manager, and Patrick Hummel, Assistant Store Manager have been supporters of Reach Out and Read for many years. Together with their staff they collected over 1000 books. Thank you for your support!

 
 
 
 
And, B&N Millbury added to the tally as well...thank you to all these Barnes and Noble stores; your contributions make a big difference in the lives of children in your region! 

 

  
Mary Jones of the DAR in Lexington is a real champion for us.  She buys new and used books ongoing, has outstanding skill at selecting them and leaves them tucked in a safe place at Carole Ferguson's house.  Often they just go into the car and straight to a clinic waiting room for giveaway.  We send cheers and thank you's for her caring contributions, and our appreciation of the DAR's focus on literacy. 

 

Another repeat donor is the Frances Jacobson Early Childhood Center at Temple Israel in Brookline, where parents donated close to 100 new books to our program practices. They are warmly welcomed, and quickly distributed!

                           

                                 

  
And, a new partner, Fini Concierge--"Consider It Done", with locations in Boston and Cape Cod, not only delivered book donations to all three locations of the Outer Cape Community Health Center, but has taken on refurbishing the waiting room for one of the participating Community Health Centers in Boston! Chantal and Alison, we are so grateful for your help!

 

From the Massachusetts Medical Director
 Marilyn Augustyn, MD
 
marilyn
 
Every once and a while a study comes out that changes the way we think- it truly shapes how we practice every day. Such a study was published almost 20 years ago in 1995 in a book by two investigators from Kansas, Hart and Risley (Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children, Risley TR, Hart B, 1995: Paul H Brookes Publishing Company, Baltimore MD). Their longitudinal study of parent-child talk in families in Kansas was conducted over a decade. A team of researchers recorded one full hour of every word spoken at home between parent and child in 42 families over a three-year period, with children from seven months to 36 months of age. The team then spent six additional years typing, coding, and analyzing 30,000 pages of transcripts. They found that at age three years, children of higher socioeconomic status (SES) heard on average 45 million words and children of lower SES heard only 13 million words. By age nine years there was a very tight link between the academic success of a child and the number of words the child's parents spoke to the child to age three.

 

From this study have come multiple follow up investigations- including most recently work that has launched the "Thirty Million Words" Project in Chicago, an innovative parent-directed program designed to harness the power of parent language to build a child's brain and impact his or her future. (http://tmw.org/)

 

One recent study, though, drove home the importance of parent-talk in both its simplicity and power. This research followed a cohort of 29 Spanish learning infants tested at 19 and 24 months. (Weisleder A, Fernald A. "Talking to Children Matters: Early Language Experience Strengthens Processing and Builds Vocabulary", Psychological Science On Line, September 2013.) Family income ranged from less than $25,000 to $75,000 per year with 79% of families reporting a yearly income below the Federal poverty line. The parents varied in years of education, most had not completed high school and ranged from 4 to 16 years of education. All parents were native Spanish speakers and Spanish was the primary language in the homes all these children.

 

Parents were asked to record their child during a typical day and a device in their clothing recorded all the words the child uttered as well as all the words they had spoken to them, both directly as well as "overheard". Families were recorded for an average of 11 hours over the course of 1 to 6 days and a technology called LENA analyzed the words spoken and heard. (Xu D, Yapanel U, Gray S, "Reliability of the LeNA language environment analysis system in young children's natural home environment. 2009, www.lenafoundation.org/Techreport.aspx/Reliability/LTR-05-2) At 24 months they examined the children's communication development.

                                                                                                             

There was striking variability in the total amount of adult speech accessible to the child which ranged from almost 29,000 adult words to fewer than 2000 words over the course of 10 hours. When talk only addressed directly to the child was considered, these differences were even more extreme with one family where caregivers spoke more than 12,000 words to the infant whereas in another family the infant heard only 670 words of child-directed speech all day. Meaningful difference?

 

 

Their outcomes were equally robust: those children who heard more child-directed speech at 19 months had larger vocabularies at 24 months. In contrast, differences in exposure to "overheard speech" (that is not directly to the child) were not related to child vocabulary size suggesting that language spoken directly is more  

supportive of communication development than merely "hearing the words."

 
What differentiates this study from the prior work by Hart and Risley is the homeogeneity of this group--all were Spanish- speaking, facing similar economic challenges, and yet the study revealed an 18-fold difference in caregiver talk to infants. Moreso, the differences in parental engagement observed were not correlated to maternal education.
  
What distinguishes families who "talk more" from those who don't will require further investigation. Just as we in the office cannot predict which families may talk more to their children and which less thus why we must get this message out to ALL families we encounter: Talk to your children! It matters! One concrete way we can do that is by talking to parents about the importance of reading aloud to their child--particularly in the US where sadly data shows that less than half of children are read aloud to every day.  
(This article appeared in the December 2013 issue of the Forum, the Massachusetts AAP newsletter.) 
REACH OUT AND READ MASSACHUSETTS CONTACT INFORMATION

 56 Roland Street, Suite 100D, 

Boston, MA 02129-1243 

Phone: 617.455.0636                                                                                   Fax:617.455.0601 

 

Alison Corning Clarke, MA, MSW -  Massachusetts Program Director                alison.clarke@reachoutandread.org

 

                                   Carole Ferguson, PNP - Boston Area Coordinator                                               carole.ferguson@reachoutandread.org 


                                        Laurie Flynn, MA - Western MA Regional Coordinator                                               laurie.flynn@reachoutandread.org   

                        Heather Robinson, MPH - Central MA Regional Coordinator                       heather.robinson@reachoutandread.org
                
      Marilyn Augustyn MD -  Massachusetts Medical Director