Note: The summary of the gains made by the children has 36 categories since children are grouped in 3 areas, with 2 levels of expectation of success and 6 areas of skills tested.

• Overall 88% to 100% of the children (depending on the category) made significant, excellent or outstanding gains!
• 2,234 children are represented in the data
• 138 schools are included in this summary with an average of 17 children per school
• Approximately 1856 volunteers worked for 32,001 hours to implement this session.

Groups of children served this session:

• 70% of the children are thought to be the type of child who just needs extra attention for a short period of time.
• 10% of the children are included in the “English as a second language factor” group
• 20% of the children are those who professionals predict may need extra support from resources within the school for another year or two only.

Anecdotal Evidence

Many very positive outcomes occurred for children, families and the Volunteer Coaches involved in Strong Start®. These successes go beyond the statistics and are captured in the testimonials of personal experiences and observations. Click here to read a sampling of these wonderful stories.

Notes:

• In the fall session the majority of children are in grade one. In the spring session the majority of children are in senior kindergarten.
• Click here for more details on the assessment data.

By Renée Francoeur

“Mama bear, I want a hug,” a little girl in pink and white sneakers softly reads out loud.

“A big hug. A small hug. A growing very tall hug.”

Clutching the yellow Bear Hugs book, she rocks back and forth in an old wooden rocking chair and doesn’t look up until she has read the last page and clapped the book shut.

Taylor Hall, 7, didn’t always like to read.

It was “hard” and “boring,” the Grade 1 student at Cambridge’s Silverheights Public School says as she bounds around the school’s spacious library, running her hands along the spines of several picture books.

“She didn’t want anything to do with it at first,” says Taylor’s mother, Tara Hall. “She would say, ‘No, I don’t have to read that,’ or ‘Why do I have to learn to write my name?’ ”

Then, sometime last year, Hall and her husband, Jason, noticed that Taylor didn’t just abhor the idea of the written word, she was actually having trouble reading.

For all junior-level students, the Hespeler-area school conducts regular “home reading” programs. It starts with simple “letter books” that the students take home to read with their families.

Taylor didn’t want to do the home readings, says Hall. She was struggling to recognize a lot of the letters, so she would get frustrated and just give up.

“I didn’t like ‘Z,’” Taylor says, “or the ‘th’s’ very much.”

Hall had speech problems herself as a young child.

“I knew one of my kids would probably be similar, but I had the extra help right through the school, right in my class — it was just part of it . . . The schools don’t exactly do that anymore — there probably just isn’t the funding.”

Luckily though, other kinds of help are still available for students like Taylor, children needing just a little boost with their reading.

Silverheights is one of 123 Waterloo Region elementary schools participating in a program for children who are struggling with literacy early on in their school years. It’s run by a local non-profit organization called Strong Start.

Founded in 2001 by Waterloo Region business leader and philanthropist Lyle Hallman and

by elementary school principal Lynda Silvester, both since deceased, Strong Start is a community project working to ensure all children have the chance to learn to read. Literacy skills, the organization says, are the strongest indicator of a child’s future success in life. It is also operating programs in 13 Wellington County schools and is spreading across southern Ontario.

Hall says she had heard about Strong Start and its success rate, so when Taylor’s senior kindergarten teacher identified Taylor as a good candidate for the program, Hall didn’t hesitate to give her consent.

“I’m so glad they flagged her for it,” she says.

“You don’t want to see your kids fail, though I know failing is part of the growing and learning process, but at a young age and especially when it comes to something as fundamental as reading, you don’t want them to feel like they can’t do it.”

Initially, Hall says, she felt like she must have done something wrong when she was helping Taylor learn the alphabet at home.

“I wasn’t even sure I was pronouncing things properly — so much of our language is slang,” she says. “And then try explaining to a child why a ‘ph’ doesn’t make a ‘p’ sound, like in ‘pot.’ It was frustrating for both of us.”

Early in the spring of 2010, Taylor started getting help through Strong Start’s chief program, called Letters, Sounds and Words. This 10-week course is designed to provide extra help to kindergarten and Grade 1 students, as identified by their teachers, who are showing signs of literacy struggle.

The students work one-on-one with a volunteer coach in their own school for half an hour at a time, two to three times a week.

“I’d get to leave class,” Taylor says excitedly. “We’d go into the French room, sometimes the library and play games!”

Rhonda Barr, the Strong Start site co-ordinator at Silverheights Public School, worked with Taylor for the entire Letters, Sounds and Words project as her volunteer coach.

“She was a lot of fun, always happy and laughing,” says Barr. “Taylor is one of those perfect target children. All she needed was a little extra attention, a little one-on-one time with someone other than Mom and Dad, and boom — she just took off with her reading.”

Hall agrees the parent-child relationship just wasn’t working the best when it came to pushing Taylor to read.

“Kids don’t want to always learn with their parents. The dynamic is different . . . and she didn’t want to learn from Kaleigh, her older sister, either. We don’t have the same technique as the Strong Start volunteers — there’s such good, intensive training, so they really know what they’re doing — and they make it fun.”

Defeating Barr — who was “awesome,” says Taylor — at the games they played was one the young girl’s favourite parts of Strong Start.

“I’d always win when we’d play tick-tac-toe,” Taylor grins. “It felt good.”

She also enjoyed playing the board game Guess Who, which helped her to recognize her upper and lower case letters.

Barr, who has been working with Strong Start for five years, says all of the students like to beat her at games — Letter Bingo seems to be the most popular — and they are a diverting way of encouraging the children to practise their letters and sounds through various repetitions.

But Strong Start isn’t just about games. The children also read books as much as possible and make a personalized ring of cue cards, one for every letter of the alphabet, for each child to take home and practise.

“Every time you said the letter right, you’d get a gold star stamp on the card,” says Taylor. “And sometimes Barbie stickers.”

After only a week or so in the program, Taylor was coming home saying letters and sounds at every opportunity.

“We’d be at the grocery store and she’d be pointing out every ‘W’ she could find,” laughs Hall. “It was something she could boast about now; she understood it and felt good about it.”

Taylor’s teacher also started to notice a difference and told Hall that Taylor was putting up her hand in class more often.

“She’s never been an overly shy child, but when it came to doing something with reading, before Strong Start, she’d put her head down and shy away a bit.”

Taylor even began to help her five-year-old brother, Iain, who was a delayed talker, to learn his letters. She taught her parents a few things, too.

“I would never have guessed to teach her to make the ‘F’ sound by putting your teeth on your bottom lip,” says Hall. “It was just amazing to see her fly with Strong Start.”

Without Strong Start, Hall says, she doesn’t know what she’d have done.

“It’d have really been a battle,” she says. “It would have come down to Jason and I really pushing her to practice and I know she’d have been overly frustrated.”

Now, a year later, when Taylor’s not getting her green soccer jersey dirty, dressing up her Barbie dolls, wiggling loose her baby teeth, or bike riding, you can bet that she’s reading.

“I like reading by myself,” says Taylor. “I really like Green Eggs and Ham. That’s my favourite book.”

rfrancoeur@therecord.com

Get Ready for School is designed to benefit children who have English as a second language or who are disadvantaged for socio-economic reasons. The program’s goal is to help close the literacy disparity gap before children start Junior Kindergarten. The program combines early literacy development with classroom learning behaviour and routines, which are necessary to ensure a positive and confident entry into school. Literacy skills are developed in many ways, including the use of carefully designed activities that encompass phonological awareness (identifying the sounds that letters make), vocabulary development, and sorting and classifying skills.

“There is amazing growth in the children over the course of the Get Ready for School program,” says Machelle Denison, Executive Director of Strong Start. “They develop rich vocabulary and an excitement for learning that gives them an increased confidence at that critical point when they prepare to enter school for the first time. We are very excited to bring this program to the community and are extremely grateful for the generous support of the Hallman Foundation,” she adds.

Get Ready for School is based on the research of Dr. Iuliana Baciu, who recently graduated with a Doctorate in Psychology from Wilfrid Laurier University. The program is delivered through community centres and runs for 22 weeks between January and June.

The Lyle S. Hallman Foundation has provided funding for the program’s two-year pilot at Popcorn House in Cambridge while the pilot site of Kingsdale Community Centre has been funded by the United Way of Kitchener Waterloo and Area and The Kitchener Waterloo Community Foundation over the same period. This is a fine example of funders working together with a common focus of helping children reach their potential.

The Lyle S. Hallman Foundation is a known champion of early literacy in our community. Lyle Hallman was the co-founder of Strong Start in 2001 and to this day the foundation continues to provide on-going, core funding to Strong Start’s flagship program, Letters Sounds and Words, which is delivered in elementary schools across this region. In their granting philosophy the Lyle S. Hallman Foundation has adopted an intentional, proactive emphasis on prevention. They continue to give priority to initiatives focused on primary prevention-strategies which promote children’s wellness and prevent problems, by providing opportunities for learning and growth.

“I am very proud of the work the foundation has done pro-actively and responsively to support early child literacy in our community,” says Hulene Montgomery, Executive Director of the Lyle S. Hallman Foundation. “It has been exciting to watch this program evolve from a PhD research thesis study to the high-impact, high-integrity program it is today”.

WATERLOO REGION — Children’s literacy is getting a boost locally.

On Wednesday evening, Social Venture Partners Waterloo Region selected Strong Start, a local children’s literacy not-for-profit organization, as its first investee organization.

“We are thrilled. It’s very exciting,” said Machelle Denison, Strong Start’s executive director. “Of course, there’s always something extra special about being the first.”

Strong Start will receive over $100,000 in grants and access to Social Venture Partners’ extensive pool of expertise and talent, which Denison referred to as a “tremendous opportunity.”

“It’s a real honour, and we’re very, very excited — as much for the grant as to have the help and expertise of the member partners,” said Denison, explaining that each of Social Venture Partners’ 50 members are local professionals who come loaded with experience, information and resources.

“They will help us assess the needs of our organization,” said Denison. “It’s kind of like having a bank of consultants willing to volunteer with your organization.”

As for the money itself, Denison said it will be used for expansion, program materials and further development.

“Our grassroots organization has grown quite exponentially in the past few years and we need to scale our infrastructure to support a large organization,” she said.

The brainchild of the late Lyle Hallman, the Strong Start program provides a boost to children after the first signs they may be lagging behind in literacy skills. The groups runs two programs, one for children in early elementary school and one for children before they start school.

In 2001, Strong Start was founded based on its Letters, Sounds and Words program, which addresses teacher-identified literacy issues in kindergarten and Grade 1 students. The children then meet with a volunteer from Strong Start two to three times a week for 20 to 30 minutes.

For English as a second language students, the program is adapted for later grades, under the banner Letters, Sounds and Words for English Language Learners.

Denison said that one-on-one attention is often all these students need. Begun in Waterloo Region, this program has spread to several communities in Southern Ontario, including 13 schools in Wellington County.

Their second effort, which is still unique to Waterloo Region, is the Get Ready for School program, for children aged three to four and about to enter junior kindergarten. The program starts in the January before the kids begin school and aims to address factors that may hamper early literacy development, such as lower socioeconomic status or a family home that does not speak English.

Strong Start has also recently partnered with other organizations to launch Baby Connections, a program aimed at stimulating infants’ early literacy.

Social Venture Partners is a regional network of individuals who offer “their time, talent and resources to invest and partner with non-profits in Waterloo Region,” according to a news release Thursday.

There are 27 other communities with individual Social Venture Partners networks of socially minded entrepreneurs in communities across North America.

Social Venture Partners Waterloo Region was founded in November 2010. It will issue its next call for letters of interest this fall.

acsanady@therecord.com

Eden Hambleton, Training assistant welcomes children and families to the Strong Start booth.

Once the passport was complete they received a free book, compliments of The Record. Families were also given a fabric book bag and take- home activities. Strong Start® welcomed over 100 children to our booth. They had a great time playing the fishing (for words) game and bean bag toss game. Two of the most popular games were a fruits and vegetables sorting game and an animal to habitat matching game, both from our Get Ready for School Program. We were happy to have Strong Start® volunteers visiting our booth to say hello and to tell us how much they enjoy the program. We also had a few teachers drop by to tell us what a difference our Letters Sounds and Words program makes to their young learners. Family Literacy Day was a wonderful opportunity to highlight our programs and to connect with the children, families and Strong Start® stakeholders in our community. Thank you to the organizing team and Conestoga Mall for hosting such a positive, fun, family-friendly event!

This was a mammoth project! It began with the students at Highland making a “picture” representation of what reading and literacy means to them (e.g. how they feel when they read their favourite book or how it feels when a special person reads to them). Each class submitted a representative picture.

The pictures were then transferred, via an elaborate and laborious process, to fabric quilt blocks. The blocks were incorporated into a beautiful quilt (approx. 70 x 90 inches) with hand-stitched, beaded stars sprinkled throughout. Tracings of hands help tell the story. The 24 stars on this quilt, alone, took about 12 hours to stitch! A lot of work and a lot of love went into this quilt.

Nancy’s named her work of art “Stitching To Read – A Quilt For Literacy”. Highland P. S. sold tickets on the quilt to raise both awareness of the importance of literacy and to generate funds for Strong Start®. An extra bonus came when the winner gave the quilt back to the school so that it could be permanently displayed.

Nancy’s motivation and her message centres on “giving”. Strong Start® Volunteers gave to her child, reading gives a person a rich life and Nancy found a way to give back.

School was always a panic situation for me when I was a child. Right from the start, I didn’t like Kindergarten. I never felt like I belonged. When I had trouble learning, my Dad would try to help me but he would get frustrated and angry. The result was I had no self-confidence and stopped trying. I didn’t finish high school. I got a job in a foundry but didn’t like it. I got a job in construction and was doing okay until I was injured on the job. Now I’m taking a retraining course as part of Worker’s Compensation.

My daughter took part in Strong Start® Letters, Sounds and Words Program and it really helped her. Then, I saw a notice in the school newsletter about needing volunteers for the Strong Start® Project. I had always wanted to be more involved in my daughter’s school so, here I am.

With the training I got as a Strong Start® Volunteer Coach I feel I can really help. One of the things I do is to encourage the children to be ‘loud and proud’ of themselves. I give them things to do like getting the Strong Start® materials from the shelf and getting them ready on the table, just like assembling your tools on a construction job. It makes them feel good to be able to do that on their own. Being happy with your set up, that’s important! If they’re waiting to be told here and can’t think for themselves, then they’re probably waiting and not thinking in other areas too. They need to be able to problem-solve or at least know how to get started at problem-solving. Simple steps like going and getting their materials gives them practice in self-direction. It gives them confidence.

I think it really helps that I’m a man since there are very few men in the schools. It helps them to hear sensitivity in a male voice. They can sense your sincerity and, if you don’t mean what you say, they can sense that too. My Strong Start® kids do well on the tests for this program, so I know they are learning a lot. I think I’m having some success in building confidence because the children I work with usually arrive early for their session with me and have a smile on their face when they leave. That’s very important. I realize now that I’m a trained volunteer, that I can do this for the children. I know the kids are going to benefit because they’re going to remember the steps you first taught them to get them over that first hurdle. It feels good to be involved and to realize how much I can do, so that children enjoy learning! Life might have been easier for me, if I enjoyed school more myself.

“Why would you do that for free when teachers are paid to do that sort of thing?” Her response was, “You just don’t get it. You just don’t get it!

It’s what it does for me. It’s leaving each day after my work with the children, feeling great. It’s realizing that I’m learning too.

I also know that what I am doing is important because teachers do not have the time to be with just one child for 25 minutes and yet that one-to-one experience for the child seems to do so much.”

I recently became a Volunteer Coach because I experienced first hand as a parent what the program could do for a child and his family.

When my son, Brad, first started to lag behind in learning early reading skills, I quickly started working with him at home with the guidance of his teacher. It became a stressful experience for both my son and me. He didn’t want to do reading activities at home and I got frustrated since I worried about his progress.

The Teacher suggested that Brad might benefit from the Strong Start®: Letters, Sounds and Words program. Sometimes a child will react better to a new person and a structured program that happens in the school setting, where the child is used to the expectation that he participate in reading activities. This certainly was true for Brad.

He made very good gains in the program, finally learning all of the names of the letters, a sound for each one and more than doubling the sight words he could read. I noticed that his ability to concentrate had improved. He became more willing to read with me at home. He could tell me what he had learned in the program and then I could reinforce it at home. Brad is a more confident learner now and we could work together more easily.

Brad continued to need extra help throughout grade one, but now in grade two he is progressing without additional school programs outside of the classroom. He enjoys reading with me at home now.

I decided to become a Volunteer Coach because I know how difficult it is when you sit down to help your child and you are both frustrated. I am grateful that my son and I now have a better relationship for homework activities. I hope to help other children and families get to this point also. I also intend to continue to support Brad in learning to read and expect that, as a volunteer, I will learn even more about how best to do this.

All the extra support provided by the school, including Strong Start®, came at just the right time for my son and my family. By becoming a Volunteer Coach I hope I can return the favour by helping others.