Even Start Family Literacy

The federally-funded Title 1 Even Start Family Literacy Program is a school-community partnership that helps break the cycle of poverty and illiteracy by integrating early childhood education, adult education, parenting education, interactive literacy activites and home visits into a unified family literacy program.

The program helps children and families achieve the academic standards set by the state and uses instructional programs that are based on scientific reading research to:

• Enrich language development, extend learning, and support high levels of educational success for children from birth through age three and their parents
• Provide literacy services of sufficient hours and duration to make sustainable changes in a family
• Provide integrated instructional services for families, where children and their parents learn together to develop habits of life-long learning
• Support families committed to education and economic independence

Program Components:

• Adult Education provides instruction so that adults can learn to speak, read, and write the English language.
• Early Childhood Education focuses on the education of very young children from birth through age eight. Family literacy programs work in the areas of physical development, social emotional development, cognitive development, and emphasize children’s eventual success in school.
• Parent Education provides parents with a wide variety of learning topics including parenting strategies, how to be advocates and role models for their children, and strategies to support their children’s learning.
• Interactive Literacy Activities provide a time to increase and facilitate meaningful parent-child interactions focused primarily on language and literacy development in a high-quality learning environment where they can learn and play together..
• Home Visits provide a means for delivering literacy instruction in a familiar setting and to emphasize that parents are the child’s first and most influential teacher.