LaAmistad | Birth-to-Five Pilot
Despite a vigorous public health effort to get every child reading in Georgia, there remain striking and persistent disparities in literacy levels for Latino children. A more proactive approach to supporting bilingual language and learning in young children—such as caregiver-mediated interventions to prevent these well-documented disparities in reading—is critical and will help to prevent the literacy disparities seen in Latino children entering the school system.
This preventative focus is the foundation of the LaAmistad Birth-to-Five pilot—leveraging the shared expertise of LaAmistad, which has been serving the Latino community in metro-Atlanta for over 20 years, and Marcus Autism Center, which is home to one of the largest clinical and research programs on early social communication development in the country.
Together, LaAmistad and Marcus Autism Center used a community-partnered approach to:
(a) understand caregivers' needs related to the language and literacy development of their young children and
(b) understand perspectives for how best to implement a culturally adapted and culturally responsive caregiver-mediated program.
This resulted in the implementation and evaluation of a culturally responsive, early literacy program for families of Latino children, ages birth to five years. The pilot focused on the delivery of Hablando Nos Entendemos Los Dos (i.e., It Takes Two to Talk), an evidence-based early intervention that teaches caregivers strategies that support their child’s communication and literacy development. Hablando Nos Entendemos Los Dos focuses on fostering referential language and gesture use, a common form of communication in Latinx culture, as a way to build children’s expressive and receptive language development. Research has shown that parents who participate in the English version of It Take Two to Talk use a more responsive interaction style with their child, comment more to their children, take more conversational turns with their children, and label more objects for their children.
Participants in the birth-to-five caregiver groups meet weekly over the course of 10-12 weeks. Meetings are run in Spanish by bilingual clinicians who are experts early communication development with the support of LaAmistad staff. Weekly meetings will include:
Motivation + Empowerment: Caregivers learn about the role they play in their child’s literacy in Spanish and English.
Education + Tools: Caregivers learn strategies to help their child learn new communication and literacy skills.
Practical Application: Caregivers practice with intention and integrate strategies into daily routines, such as mealtime, bath time, and time with family.
Community Building: Caregivers learn alongside other caregivers of children of the same age.
Continued Learning: Parents get workbooks that they can take home and use as part of this program
The joint delivery of the birth-to-five program between Marcus Autism Center and LaAmistad staff continues to focus on capacity building and generating an implementation plan to sustain and scale a birth-to-five model within other school- and community-based systems serving the Latino community.
