"It's rhyme time," Thayanithy Mohanasingam says, with a big smile.

"The white cat sat on the big man's hat," continues the mother of three, sitting in her sunlit Jane St. and Finch Ave. apartment, reading from a cheat sheet. "And cat and hat rhyme."

Today, Mohanasingam's audience is her instructor, Dorothy Tabe, but soon she'll have to practise the game with her 5-year-old daughter, Menorah.

This is one of the many exercises Mohanasingam has been learning weekly over the past year as part of a unique program called HIPPY (Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters) that teaches low-income immigrant parents how to be their preschoolers' first teacher – and get their children ready for Canadian school.

Created in Israel in 1969 as a research project, the international program has been proven in other cities to give disadvantaged kids an educational boost, with a combination of easy-to-use activity packets for parents, weekly home visits and occasional group meetings.

But, as with so many innovative programs designed to lift families in poverty, there's no long-term commitment to continuing it in Toronto. Seed money from the Trillium Foundation and the United Way will be running out by June.

"We got the money to start up this great program, but we need stable funding to sustain it," sighs executive director Marcie Ponte, who's scrambling to secure funding for another year.

Currently, Toronto's Working Women Community Centre offers the two-year program free of charge to 60 immigrant families in the Jane-Finch neighbourhood, from Tamil, Hispanic, South Asian, Vietnamese and African backgrounds. Its aim is to improve pre-literacy, numerical, linguistic and cognitive skills by working through the parents of 3- to 5-year-olds.

It costs the agency about $1,250 per child for two years.

"The program helps parents to be in their child's shoes, to learn how a child learns, so the kids can have a head start and know what's expected when they go to school," explains project co-ordinator Charmaine Greenidge, who spearheaded Toronto's HIPPY in September 2005.

"Most of these kids start school at a disadvantage because they come from an at-risk neighbourhood. Our hope is to bridge that gap and help prepare them with a positive learning experience."

A Simon Fraser University study that looked at a Vancouver HIPPY program found the child participants outperformed their peers in learning basic concepts such as time and direction, and scored higher in memory, visual, quantitative and verbal intelligence.

Like many immigrant women, Mohanasingam, a refugee from Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami, stays home with her children – Mathushikaa, 10, Menorah, 5, and Meshach, 6 months – and feels isolated from the outside world.

She says there are very few activities to stimulate a child's learning in her home country, and many of the tricks she's learning are new to her.

"I am very happy. This is very helpful to me and it helps improve my kids' learning," Mohanasingam says between spending time role-playing – tracing numbered dots, imitating a mail carrier and going through questions on a new storybook, The Pigs Got Out – and tending to the baby waking from his nap.

Home visitor Dorothy Tabe says that for some of the mothers she visits, her hour-long stop is the only chance they have to interact with an outsider.

"This is all about access. The more knowledgeable you are, the better you are in accessing programs. Without the knowledge, you are stuck and your children are stuck," says Tabe, herself a mother of two young girls, who came to Canada from Cameroon in 2002.

After assigning and practising a new chapter of exercises for the week, Tabe moves on to another client in the same building.

She takes out her copy of The Happy Day, a picture book about animals, and asks parent Bawany Thuraisingam how she did with the previous week's assignment with 3-year-old daughter Rushanaa.

"All these parents are very interested in their children's education," Tabe says.

"It's very rewarding to see the kids learning, from no English to identifying shapes, colour and numbers. I'm just happy that it's helping them."