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Early Learning Coalition FACILITATING LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT Grant: $60, 366 Funds Used: $24,674 Total Children Served: 187 Focus Area: Early Childhood Development Program Description: This professional development program focuses on language development in young children by providing coaching, modeling, consultation, and technical assistance to teachers in classrooms with three to five-year old children. The program is designed to target those areas that brain research finds most beneficial for children's brain development, including back -and -forth conversational exchanges. The Classroom Assistance Scoring System (CLASS) tool was administered as a pre -assessment for baseline data on each classroom, and this data informed the coaching activities conducted with each teacher. The intent was to conduct pre/post assessments in each classroom to measure growth and improvement in the Instructional Support domain. This domain includes three key dimensions: Concept Development, Quality of Feedback, and Language Modeling, all of which are critical for developing language skills in young children. Selection of participating Providers and classrooms within Indian River County were based on several factors, including overall CLASS scores, as well as the dimension scores within the Instructional Support domain. The Provider's Florida Kindergarten Readiness Screener (FLKRS) score was also a consideration in the selection process. Please note that with the onset of COVID-19 in March, the program pivoted to support participating Providers virtually, when site visits were no longer advisable. The Literacy Coach maintained relationships with directors and teachers and provided language and literacy resources for directors, classroom teachers and families. A virtual classroom was developed with lesson plans and activities for teachers and families with three- to five- year old children. Program Activities: Pre -assessments were conducted in participating classrooms using the CLASS tool, and the Knowledge test was administered as a pre -assessment for participating teachers. Classroom designations were made with assignments as "freshman" or "sophomore" cohorts, depending on whether the teacher/classroom participated in this program the previous year. The site visit dosage was set up as weekly for the freshman cohort and monthly for the sophomore cohort. Literacy coaching site visits were conducted until March 11, 2020. Site Visits: There were 81 total site visits for the period through March 11, 2020. Dec. 2019 —17 visits Jan. 2020 — 24 visits Feb. 2020 — 32 visits Mar. 2020 — 8 visits March 2020 through 9/30/20: In March, the day to day activities of our literacy programming were tailored to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic response from the Governor's office mandating social distancing through the "Safer at Home" Executive Order. The program pivoted to provide coaching support to participating Providers virtually, including language and literacy resources for directors, classroom teachers and families as well as one- on- one customized literacy coaching sessions and conferences. 112