Vitamins R and L Project

From over two-hundred applications to the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, the “Vitamins R (Reading) and L(Literacy) Project in Twiggs” grant was one of forty-one funded. Key agencies in the community serve as grant partners: Twiggs County Public Schools, Twiggs County Health Department, Twiggs County Public Library and Mercer University School of Medicine.

Sessions are held at Jeffersonville Elementary School during the school year and at Twiggs County Public Library during the summer. Many of the parents renewed or secured new library cards and children went home with books to be read aloud to them. Adults at the July session filled the meeting room, while the children were supervised and entertained by Twiggs County Middle/High School student volunteers and the TCPS Parent Engagement Coordinator.

The true beneficiaries of the grant are the children and caregivers who attend monthly meetings. Books, research findings about reading aloud and increasing the language of young children, and bags of healthy foods filled with nutritious vitamins go home with the participants monthly. The grant was written to serve ten families, but the number of participants has grown from four to eleven. The grant sessions will continue through December 2019 with new books and vocabulary building activities each month. Success has led to discussion of ways to continue the program in the community beyond that point.

Assessment of the children from beginning to end of the eighteen-month program is measuring their growth in Receptive Language (words they understand when they hear them) and Expressive Language (words they actually can say). Observation of the children and current assessment results show much progress is being made. From the beginning, the focus of all involved has been having these children, and all others their age, reading on grade level by the end of third grade. All involved know about the strong research tied to this need.