Georgia College’s Sandra Dunagan Deal Center for Early Language and Literacy, in partnership with the School of Continuing and Professional Studies, celebrated former first lady Sandra Deal’s 83rd birthday Feb. 1 by reading to 12 classes at the Baldwin County Early Learning Center.
Deal was an advocate for childhood literacy. Before becoming the first lady of Georgia, she taught language arts for more than 15 years until retiring as a sixth-grade, middle-school teacher in Hall County. In 2017, Georgia College & State University opened the Deal Center as a state-funded educational institute to improve reading outcomes for the children of Georgia.
“We offer a variety of programs that reach from Baldwin County to the entire state,” said Executive Director Dr. Lindee Morgan.
According to Morgan, the Deal Center has an extensive collection of children’s books and chose a winter theme for the book reading at the Early Learning Center, due to the recent excitement of snow days and time of year.
“We held a similar celebration event last year, reading to kids as Mrs.
Sandra Dunagan Deal did many times,” said Morgan. “The School of Continuing and Professional Studies is a longtime partner of the center and worked with us to make a larger impact this year. The Early learning Center ranges from twoto five-year olds, but we read to the majority fouryear olds.”
Children need formal reading instruction, which the center advocates for and helps to provide through evidence-based programs, training, and program models.
According to Morgan, reading to a child as early as the second trimester offers several benefits.
“We used to think reading to children turned them into readers, and while that is partially true, reading to children creates the foundation for becoming a successful reader,” said Morgan. “It gives them ample background knowledge on the world as they enter into formal schooling by enriching their vocabulary, enhancing their familiarity with print concepts, and differentiating the sounds of their native language.
“Within the second trimester of pregnancy, babies have ears and can hear the voice of their caregivers and be exposed to sound. Exposure to the sound of language primes children’s brains to more quickly respond to and understand that language. The impact of reading to a child only grows as they age,” added Morgan.
The Deal Center operates a grant mechanism to fund communities across the state and facilitate language and literature- oriented activities, as well as funds research within the University System of Georgia. It also actively teaches community members how to be volunteer readers, like the individuals who read at the Early Learning Center. “Our vision is to have a Georgia where everyone has the tools to support children on the path to literacy, so across the board our programming is aimed at not just the children but the adults who support those children,” said Morgan. “We are funded by the Georgia Legislature and our work is aimed to spread across every county, which includes funding through grant programs.”
In Baldwin County, the Deal Center partners with Communities in Schools and Lakeview Primary School to offer a reading clinic, where a trained cohort of undergraduate Georgia College students offer support to struggling readers. The GCSU students are trained in an evidence-based phonics curriculum to work closely with students on phonological awareness.
“Phonological awareness is the ability to take in and process the sounds of the English language, break them into the smallest units of sounds, and be able to see letters on the page and map them to sound. That is a major area of deficit, so we are working to help them decode what they are reading to become more fluent,” said Morgan.
“The reading clinic works with kindergarten through third grade. And though we do not have the bandwidth to expand the program ourselves, we have developed this initial implementation to create a model others can emulate and offer in their communities.”
Beyond its programs, the Deal Center hosts an annual Governor’s Summit to bring together people from around the state that work “at leadership levels across the different entities in the language and literature ecosystem.” This year’s summit, titled “Brain Building Network: Bridging the Science of Learning with the Science of Reading,” will take place July 8-9 at GCSU.
“The idea of the summit is to bring practitioners from across the state that serve children from birth through eighth grade.
We are providing them with up-to-date content relevant to best practices in their field, strategy sessions, the latest research, and provide state and agency level updates,” said Morgan.
“The goal is thinking how a professional community can work together to influence early brain development across a variety of sectors.”
To learn more about the Sandra Dunagan Deal Center for Early Language and Literacy, visit galiteracycenter. org.