Wyandotte County Early Reading First

ABSTRACT

This ERF project builds upon an existing collaboration among two local urban preschool programs, early childhood support programs within Project EAGLE of the University of Kansas Medical Center, and early literacy researchers at Juniper Gardens Children’s Project of the University of Kansas. The purpose of the Wyandotte County ERF (Wy-ERF) is to substantially increase the intensity of language and literacy instruction so that children from urban core Kansas City, Kansas families improve academically. Nine classrooms, 27 teachers, and 160 children from local Head Start and El Centro preschools participate in ERF. The project integrates the intensity-rich tiered model of implementation, research-based literacy materials, summer and monthly on-going professional development, and data-driven instructional decision-making. Each classroom has a 1 to 6 or few teacher/child ratio.. There is a mentor coach for every three classrooms and sufficient assistance from an intervention coach to ensure criterion-level implementation of tier-two intervention.

The Wy-ERF two-tier model focuses on differentiated instruction through data-driven decision-making. These two tiers substantially increase the intensity of pre-literacy and oral language development instruction and help to prevent later reading difficulties among our young urban core children. Our Wy-ERF project has hese five goals: (1) To integrate research-based instructional materials and literacy activities, (2) To increase the use of evidence-based instructional strategies and activities, (3) To raise the level of environmental support, (4) To provide and support professional development based on scientifically-based reading research that will enhance preschoolers’ language, literacy and pre-reading development, and (5) To increase the use of screening and progress monitoring reading assessments that will effectively identify children at-risk for reading failure and lead to improved instruction for individual children.