Sparling – introduction to abecedarian

The Abecedarian project began in 1972, and at that time we were trying to scientifically determine if we could make the prediction that poor children and disadvantaged children would not do well in school not be true; make that prediction not happen. And, in fact, that is what we found. We could take children that by all previous experience not done well in school improve their school performance to a very substantial degree and have them have a better outcome both in school and in life. 

The key components are educational components. Now, we believe that any program needs to have good health care and good social services and good transportation surrounding it, and Abecedarian had all those. But the key components are childcare, full time childcare year round, fifty weeks a year, and that has a certain set of characteristics. Those characteristics is that it uses learning games, it uses conversational reading, and it uses enriched care giving, and within all those three elements it uses a language priority. That is it focuses first and foremost on language as the most important thing that we do as early childhood people. 

Abecedarian is an ordinary English language word, it comes from Latin and it means someone who is learning the rudiments, someone who’s learning the basics. It’s kind of a fun word. When I was a second grade teacher I used to use the word abecedarian on the first day of school and write on the board I am an abecedarian, I am someone who’s learning the basics. And by the way, if you say kids, look at that word, what do you see about it, they see it has a b c d at the beginning, and that’s no accident. The word has been created to refer to the alphabet, so it refers to the alphabet or someone who is learning the rudiments, but I want to be sure that I say that we don’t necessarily teach the alphabet, it’s just the alphabet is a metaphor for the basics, the building blocks.