The Strong Beginnings for Babies Project is designed for supporting families of infants in discovering strategies that are helpful, culturally relevant, and easy to use for fostering their children’s language development.
Strong Beginnings for Babies is designed for supporting families of infants in discovering strategies that are helpful, culturally relevant, and easy to use for fostering their children’s language development. More specifically, this project is focused on the families of children who are slated to enter high-poverty schools at kindergarten entry, as these children are at risk for having smaller vocabularies than children from more affluent backgrounds.
Paola Contreras, Ana Valdez and Ethel Horton are coaches in the project and conduct small group sessions with the families to discuss a variety of language development strategies. Two Elon students, Rachel Barrett and Perry Mede, coordinate volunteer child care services.
“It’s exciting to have a pilot program study like this in our community and I hope it grows,” Baltutis said.