Providence won the grand prize in the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayor Challenge this week, garnering $5 million for an innovative early learning initiative that will build young vocabularies and complement the local grade-level reading effort.

Beating out 300 proposals from across the country, the Providence Talks initiative includes outfitting children under age 4 with small electronic devices that will record how many words and conversations these children hear each day.  The words will then be counted and conversations analyzed to provide feedback to parents and caregivers on how to build children’s word knowledge. The program is free, confidential and completely voluntary.

We’re focusing on closing the vocabulary gap,” Providence Mayor Angel Taveras said in an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Wednesday. “We’re going to be doing home visit  with our parents and caregivers and helping to develop not only young children but helping to develop the first teacher in their lives, their parents.” .

Philanthropist and New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg set up the contest to encourage mayors to come up with innovative ideas that can be replicated in other cities. “Providence has identified a new model of early childhood education that is direct, simple and fundamentally revolutionary,” he said.

Research shows that lower-income children hear an estimated 30 million fewer words than their higher income peers in the early years. That word gap affects children’s vocabulary development and can set into motion a lifelong struggle with reading and learning.

Currently, fewer than half of the Providence’s students are reading on grade-level by the beginning of fourth grade.  Mayor Tavares’s grade-level reading initiative, Providence Reads, is working toward ensuring that 70 percent of the city’s students are reading proficiently by 2015.

The efforts include increasing the percentage of children going to pre-school, making the child care rating system more rigorous and, through the Providence Children’s Initiative, drastically reducing the chronic absence rate for the youngest students. The city’s efforts were featured in a recent story in Casey Connects, published by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.