University of Maryland, College Park

The University of Maryland, College Park; the Maryland State Library Agency; and multiple community partners dedicated to supporting children and families will adapt and evaluate the original Hatchling program to empower under-resourced new parents to engage their babies in early language- and literacy-building activities both in and out of the library. The project team will create a culturally responsive adaptation of the original Hatchling curriculum that better meets the needs of racially and ethnically marginalized identities, immigrants, and English language learners. The team will then evaluate the new program’s effects on parents’ self-efficacy for building their child’s foundation of language and literacy skills, the naturalistic home language environment, and family library use. This project will leverage the collective, cross-disciplinary expertise of librarians, researchers, educators, neuroscientists, speech language pathologists, child development experts, and other partners to establish an open-access, flexible, scalable national model supporting the foundations of language and literacy development in young children.