The Family Literacy Project is a preventive program designed to increase lower income children\u27s language readiness for school. The project\u27s approach to literacy enhancement involves both tutoring the children and training the parents to be more effective first teachers of the types of emergent reading skills that are prerequisites to formal elementary school reading instruction. Forty-five undergraduates were trained as literacy facilitators and met on a weekly basis with ninety preschoolers enrolled in Head start or with participating parents (N=20) . The specific tutoring of the children varied according to the child\u27s specific areas of language strengths and weaknesses. The parent training utilized the Parents as Partners in Reading literacy curriculum (Edwards, 1990)