Print Awareness Paper

The city of San Antonio continues to grow in population and within the NISD school district the Hispanic population is 68.4% and continues to rise above all other ethnicities within the school district each year.
The U.S Census Bureau projects the Hispanic population will become the country’s largest minority group in less than five years. By 2050, Hispanics are expected to make up one-quarter of the population (Joinson, 2000). Due to many Spanish speaking families coming into the district speaking little to no English gives our library the opportunity to reach out and offer a number of services to these patrons. Children from the ages of 3-5 rapidly develop print awareness when adults engage in activities to build their early literacy skills. Without print awareness children will not develop letter sound correspondence, word reading skills, or the ability to read and understand text.
The majority of households that are moving into our schools are typically households of 4-5 family members who have pre-school children that range between the ages of 3-4 years old who speak no to very limited English.

Although many public libraries offer a number of read aloud pre-school programs during the day there has yet to be a read-aloud Spanish pre-school program offered to help meet the needs of these children’s awareness of print and to give their caregivers the tools and strategies to help narrow academic achievement gap.

The librarian will develop and lead, with other literacy staff members, such as the reading specialist and Academic Support teachers an in day reading program held for 1 hour twice a month for non school age children and caregivers. During this time our goal is to align pre-school print awareness skills to students who are not in a pre-school program by helping understand that print has a function by modeling for caregiver an effective read aloud and print referencing

techniques.
In order to reach our target audience our focus is to get the attention of stay at home parents or child care givers who care for Spanish pre-school children. we as a school library would advertise by sending out colorful flyers printed in Spanish home with older siblings, do an all call in Spanish to their homes or cell phones, advertise on the marquee that is located in the front of the school. All forms of communication will include an invite to initial informational meeting to collaborate about their concerns or needs about their pre-school child’s academic needs and what caregivers want to learn to better prepare their child to read.
The outreach program will partner up the Banres and Nobles, public library, neighborhood police and fire stations, and parks.