Somerville Somerville was the second community to receive the Raising A Reader program. Heloísa Micheletti Alvarez joined the RAR MA team in July, 2008. She has been giving ongoing support to the 98 sites we are currently serving in these areas, and launching to 55 additional sites, reaching a total of 1,872 children and their families. She has trained 64 educators, 161 families and completed 47 site visits. After participating in Catholic Charities home providers in-service training in September 2008, Heloísa started to devote special attention to these partners. For the first time RAR MA is able to give individual attention to each family child care provider by visiting each of the current 70 providers’ homes, customizing materials according to their needs, offering parent workshops at their sites in different languages, and modeling dialogical story times for both families and providers. In addition RAR MA has substantially increased its partnership with Head Start. We now support 230 Head Start families in Cambridge and Tri City area, and we have been providing on-site trainings for staff and families. As a result of their enthusiasm for our program, Tri City Head Start family social workers have asked Heloísa to participate in their monthly family meetings, in order to provide even more comprehensive support to families and help them adopt a daily habit of interactive story time. In Somerville, RAR has increased its outreach to immigrant families by offering customized workshops on interactive reading to English learner families in their home language (Portuguese and Spanish). Outcomes: • 84% of families reported that they now share books 3 or more times per week • 74% of families reported that they now have a regular reading routine • 100% of all families who read less than twice a week before RAR MA report reading 3 or more times every week now Raising A Reader MA as partnered with all identified early care and education programs in Somerville, serving infants, toddlers, preschool and public pre-k children of varying abilities. We currently partner with the following early childhood programs in Somerville:
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