Washington – The children and parents who were gathered for story time one recent Saturday morning heard “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” not once but twice.
“In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf,” the Eric Carle classic began in the first rendition.
“Bajo la luz de la luna, encima de una hoja, habia un huevecillo,” it began in the second.
Afterward, children drew caterpillars and butterflies and ate cupcakes. Everyone left with a copy of the book. Among the crowd at the CentroNia family support center were Angie Lemus, 5, and her mother, Sandra Gomez, 19.
“When I was little, no one read books to me,” said Gomez, a daughter of Salvadoran immigrants. “My mother didn’t have any kind of education at all, so it was hard for her to read a book even in Spanish.”
But Gomez has a different routine with Angie. “Every night we read a book,” she said. “Now it’s normal.”
That is exactly the kind of shift at home that educators seek to address in a major academic challenge: Latino children nationwide tend to start kindergarten knowing less about letters and numbers compared with their non-Hispanic white peers. Many never catch up.
“It’s partly about parents not understanding the American system,” said Eugene Garcia, an Arizona State University administrator and chairman of the National Task Force on Early Childhood Education for Hispanics. “Hispanic parents think school is good and education is good. They just don’t have the tools they need.”
About 40 percent of Latino 3- and 4-year-olds (and 5-year-olds not yet in kindergarten) are enrolled in prekindergarten programs, compared with about 60 percent of white and African- American children, according to the Washington-based advocacy group Pre-K Now.
In addition, a new report from Garcia’s task force noted that Latino mothers generally read and talk less to their children compared with white parents. Latino families also tend to have fewer kids’ books at home.
Targeted programs and increased outreach to Latino families can make a difference, a point stressed by Garcia’s task force and the National Education Association teachers union. The stakes are high because about one of every five children in the U.S. younger than 8, about 6.8 million in all, was Hispanic in 2000, experts say.
“We talk about the high dropout rates of the Latino population and the achievement gap,” said Michael Lopez, executive director of the National Center for Latino Child & Family Research in Washington. “If we think it’s bad now, what happens when the population continues to grow and we don’t do anything about it?”
