Read past storytime features: Robin, David, Terry, Holly, Prany, Amari, Cheryl, and Sue.

Storyteller: Kathy Pitchford, Riverside

Kathy Pitchford is a literacy coach for preschool teachers in Riverside Unified Early Childhood Head Start and state preschool programs.
 
I was a preschool teacher for 13 years before I entered the public school system as a kindergarten and first grade instructor. I was trained as a literacy coach through the Foundation for Comprehensive Early Literacy Learning and began providing literacy support and professional development to Head Start and state pre-kindergarten teachers in Riverside Unified School District. Through my professional experience, I came to believe in preschool and its positive effects on young children and their families.
 
I watch families enter Riverside’s Head Start and state preschool programs with so much promise and hope for their child’s future. However, many of our families do not have adequate resources and do not know how to go about moving in the right direction. In one year, our preschool programs help our families to become productive and help them to set achievable goals towards the children’s and family’s success. We see families grow in confidence and knowledge and move into the public school system ready to make a commitment to the process that is education.

We have a wonderful staff of teachers, community assistants and office assistants that work tirelessly to make all this possible.  From first-hand experience, we feel that all preschool teachers need higher educational requirements and competitive salaries in order to deliver the most effective program possible. Preschool teachers also need on-going professional development that helps them to continually reflect on how they are teaching our youngest students, and what they could do better. Our program holds professional development sessions once a month throughout the entire school year. In addition to supporting our educators, we are constantly learning new and exciting approaches to teaching literacy to our preschool students. Our staff has been so successful at embracing teaching methods, such as interactive writing and interactive read aloud, that Los Angeles Unified School District's LAUP program will be sending some of its staff to observe in our classrooms next year.
 
Early childhood educators have always recognized that young children have a great capacity to learn. We often say that they are "little sponges"! What we have done in our classrooms, is simply add a layer of literacy learning on top of the traditional preschool curriculum that continues to provide fun activities and lots of socialization. We are proud that our preschoolers enter kindergarten with so much knowledge already under their belts.