DECATUR - Ten toddlers and their caregivers may have spent a lot of time using imaginary hammers and saws, but jingle bells on sticks also turned out to be useful tools for building skills.

Jana Howe and her 2½-year-old daughter, Sophie, for example, paid close attention to how theirs sounded as they tapped them on their shoulders, each other's noses and just in front of their ears, then joined in singing a song about bells ringing, shaking, tapping, rolling and resting.

The one-on-one exercise was part of a Kindermusik class the pair is taking at Baby TALK. It's their third.

"It has made her speech better," Howe said. "She talks better than most kids her age."

Thus the class is one of many ways Baby TALK fulfills the mission it started out with 20 years ago to enhance child development and nurture parent-child relationships during the critical early years. With its acronym standing for Teaching Activities for Learning and Knowledge, the nonprofit agency will celebrate with its annual endowment dinner in two weeks.

But the accomplishment its founders treasure most is touching the lives of more than 30,000 babies born in Macon County since Oct. 1, 1986, and their families.

Longtime volunteer Eve Shade remembers how she and Claudia Quigg, founder and executive director of Baby TALK, started talking about how important it is for mothers to nurture their babies and read to them right away.

Shade's own daughter, an intensive care pediatrics nurse, had just given birth to her first child and didn't totally realize this.

"Claudia took the idea and ran with it," Shade said in a telephone interview from her home in Temecula, Calif. "Her warmth and charisma is how Baby TALK has gotten as far as it has."

Baby TALK has an annual budget of about $1 million, employs 40 people, eight of whom are full time and provides at Central Christian Church and in cooperation with other agencies a family literacy program, alternative education for teen parents and a Success Together Experiencing Play and Stimulation, or STEPS, Program for children with developmental delays.

"We provide more intensive support to families who are at a vulnerable point in time in their parenting," said Deb Widenhofer, coordinator of early intervention services.

Cindy Bardeleben, family literacy coordinator, said helping parents learn to read, earn a GED or speak English also gives their children a leg up.

"Study after study shows the higher the level of the parent's education, the higher the level of success the children can achieve," she said.

Between 85 and 100 people have earned their high school equivalency and about 45 have been helped with English through Baby TALK's family literacy program in the past decade.

Baby TALK also provides an array of outreach programs open to everyone at its offices at 500 E. Lake Shore Drive, such as Kindermusik and Come Sign With Me classes, and on location, such as Baby TALK Times small parent-child groups, lapsits where parents and children can interact around a theme and read-alouds at the Community Health Improvement Center and at the Macon County Health Department's immunization clinic.

The agency's core program, however, remains the one it started with - visiting obstetric units of both Decatur hospitals to inform new parents about available services, talk with them about newborn behavior and issues and give them a book to read to their baby.

When approaching that task for the first time, Quigg felt afraid. "How would I dare to tread on something so personal as a family's experience of raising their own children?" she wondered.

Then she encountered a 15-year-old mother who was deaf and mute, and suddenly, the words she planned to say about interacting with her baby didn't seem as important as standing at the nursery window with her to admire the newborn.

"In 20 years of serving families, our programs have become more complex and effective. Our staff members have learned techniques to enable them to be a greater help to parents," Quigg said. "But I never lose sight of the fact that the most important thing we ever do is simply come alongside parents, experiencing with them the wonder of their child."

The Rev. Rita Briggs of Decatur, now pastor of Oak Grove Church of the Nazarene, was one of the first new mothers Quigg came to see after her youngest son, Stephen, was born Oct. 3, 1986, in St. Mary's Hospital.

"It was an encouraging reminder to me that you can start reading to your child even that young," Briggs said.

Stephen, now 20 and a student at Richland Community College, is an avid reader, and Briggs has two grandchildren, ages 4 months and 1 week, who also have received their first books from Baby TALK. "It's a wonderful program," she said.

Affiliated with Harvard Medical School's Touchpoints parent education program and pediatrician Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, Baby TALK also trains professionals working with young families nationwide. Its program model is represented in 32 states and is one of three models programs for children ages 0 to 3 must use to be funded by the Illinois State Board of Education.

Brazelton said Baby TALK has helped him establish 76 Touchpoints sites around the country, an achievement he never thought to see in his lifetime.

"What they've been able to accomplish is an example for the rest of the country," he said in a telephone interview from his home office in Cambridge, Mass.

Carol Condon, executive director of the Richland Community College Foundation, said she pored over the developmental newsletters sent periodically by Baby TALK after her son Tommy was born in 1995 and frequently took him to lapsits so she could bounce ideas off other parents.

"It really built up my confidence, and I had the challenge of being a stay-at-home mom when most of my friends had teenagers," Condon said.

Cindy Funk, a part-time art teacher at Johns Hill Magnet School, said she might not have known to stick with reading had she not received a visit from Baby TALK at Decatur Memorial Hospital after giving birth to her oldest child in 1989.

"At first, all Jack wanted was to eat, hit and throw the books," she said, "but now he wants to stay up all night reading."

That early success caused Funk to keep reading with all four of her children and take the two youngest - Sam, now 11, and Julia, now 10 - to Kindermusik after classes began in 1998.

Funk also takes Julia and her older daughter, Sarah, 14, to a mother-daughter book discussion that meets at the Decatur Public Library.

"Sharing a love of reading really can be the basis for that all-important parent-child connection," Funk said, "and a lifelong passion for reading is one of the best gifts a parent can give."

Theresa Churchill can be reached at tchurchill@herald-review.com or 421-7978.