Why do some children get a
head start on vocabulary?
Chapter One: Why read aloud?
What are the skills a child needs for kindergarten?
There is one skill that matters above all others, because it is the prime predictor of school success or failure: the
child’s vocabulary upon entering school. Yes, the child goes to school to learn new words, but the words he or she
already knows determine how much of what the teacher says will be understood. And since most instruction for the
first four years of school is oral, the child who has the largest vocabulary will understand the most, while the child
with the smallest vocabulary grasps the least.
Once they begin reading, personal vocabulary feeds (or frustrates) comprehension. And, since school grows
increasingly complicated with each grade, that's why school-entry vocabulary tests predict so accurately.
How is It that some kids get a head start on vocabulary?
Conversation is the prime garden in which vocabulary grows, but conversations vary greatly from home to home.
Consider the eye-opening findings of Drs. Betty Hart and Todd Risley at the University of Kansas from their
research on children’s early lives. But before I share that, let me tell you how I share this with parents, because I'm
often asked by educators how I manage to share this without insulting someone. Here's how I introduced it to 150
Title 1 (poverty) parents in Tennessee one morning:
"I'm going to tell you a secret now—a government secret. It's the
equivalent of all that smoking and cancer research—except this tells us
why certain kids' brains live long and why other children's brain's die
young. The government has known this since 1996, yet no president has
talked about it publicly, Democrat or Republican, no governor will talk
about it. They're all afraid that if they shared this research, some of you
might be insulted and then they'd lose votes. Instead, they told you a lie,
that it was all the fault of schools and the awful teachers. That gets them
some votes—but it's a lie. I'm not running for office, so I don't have to lie. I
hope you're not insulted by what I'm going to tell you, but—honestly? I'm
more interested in helping your child than saving your feelings. So here's
the secret. Here's what helps your children the most and here's what hurts
them the most."
And then I told them about the research you'll read next. They gave me a
standing ovation, so I guess they felt more informed than insulted.
Published as Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children,17 the research
began in response to what Hart and Risley saw among the four-year-olds in the university lab school. With many
children, the lines were already drawn. Some were far advanced and some far behind. When these same children
were tested at age three and then again at nine, the differences held. What caused the differences so early?
The researchers began by identifying 42
families representing three socioeconomic
welfare, working class, and professional.
when the children were seven months old,
visited the homes for one hour a month,
continued their visits for two and one-half
each visit, the researcher tape-recorded
transcribed by hand any conversations and
taking place in front of the child.
normal
groups:
Beginning
researchers
and
years. During
and
actions
Through 1,300 hours of visits, they
23 million bytes of information for the
database, categorizing every word (noun,
adjective, etc.) said in front of the child.
accumulated
project
verb,
The project held some surprises: Regardless of socioeconomic level, all 42 families said and did the same things
with their children. In other words, the basic instincts of good parenting are there for most people, rich or poor.
And then the researchers received the data printout and saw the “meaningful differences” among the 42 families.
hen the daily number of words for each group
projected across four years, the four-year-old
professional family will have heard 45 million
working-class child 26 million, and the welfare child only
three children will show up for kindergarten on the same
have heard 32 million fewer words. If No Child Left Behind
teacher to get this child caught-up, she'll have to speak 10
for 900 hours to reach the 32-million mark by year's end. I
life support ready for her.
of children was
child from the
words,
the
13 million. All
day, but one will
expects
the
words a second
hope they have
The word gap among those children has nothing to do
with how much
those parents love them. They all love their children and
want the best for
them, but some parents have a better idea of what needs to
be said and done
to reach that best. They know the child needs to hear words
repeatedly
in
meaningful sentences and questions, and they know that
plunking a twoyear-old down in front of a television set for three hours at
a time is more
harmful than meaningful. Sociologists Farkas and Beron
studied
the
research on 6,800 children from ages 3 to 12, and found that children from the lower SES were far more likely to
arrive at school with smaller vocabularies (12-14 months behind) and they seldom made up the loss as they grew
older.18 (See the summer-loss chart.)
The message in this kind of research is unambiguous: It’s not the toys in the house that make the difference in
children’s lives; it’s the words in their heads. The least expensive thing we can give a child outside of a hug turns
out to be the most valuable: words. You don’t need a job, a checking account, or even a high school diploma to talk
with a child. If I could select any piece of research that all parents would be exposed to, Meaningful Differences
would be the one. And that's feasible. The authors took their 268-page book and condensed it into a six-page article
for American Educator (Spring, 2003), the journal of the American Federation of Teachers, which may be freely
reproduced by schools.19
If schools are to enlist the help of the 7,800-hour curriculum, then we must stop telling parents lies about schools,
and the truth about what helps and hurts children the most.
In the Spring of 2003, the Policy Information Center of Educational Testing Service (ETS) published a report
called Reading and Literacy in America, describing the wide and growing literacy gap between American social
classes, one they could trace all the way back to kindergarten. According to ETS' research, little of what occurs
between kindergarten and 12th grade changes the chasm of achievement uncovered in the findings of Hart and
Risley. To view charts of their findings, see Income-Literacy.
LENA Home Developmental Snapshot Testimonials Resources About Us
The 1995 Hart & Risley Study
Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children describes the
remarkable findings of Betty Hart, Ph.D., and Todd R. Risley, Ph.D. Their longitudinal study of
parent-child talk in families in Kansas was conducted over a decade. A team of researchers
recorded one full hour of every word spoken at home between parent and child in 42 families
over a three year period, with children from seven months to 36 months of age. The team then
spent six additional years typing, coding, and analyzing 30,000 pages of transcripts.
Follow-up studies by Hart and Risley of those same children at age nine showed that there was a
very tight link between the academic success of a child and the number of words the child’s
parents spoke to the child to age three.
Hart and Risley’s Three Key Findings:
1. The variation in children’s IQs and language abilities is relative to the amount parents speak to
their children.
2. Children’s academic successes at ages nine and ten are attributable to the amount of talk they
hear from birth to age three.
3. Parents of advanced children talk significantly more to their children than parents of children
who are not as advanced.


“With few exceptions, the more parents
“Differences in the amount of cumulative
talked to their children, the faster the
children’s vocabularies were growing and
experience children had ... were strongly
linked to differences at age three in
the higher the children’s IQ test scores at
age three and later.”
children’s rates of vocabulary growth,
vocabulary use, and general
“The data revealed that the most important accomplishments and strongly linked to
aspect of children’s language experience is differences in school performance at age
its amount.”
nine.”
Betty Hart, Ph.D. and Todd R. Risley, Ph.D.
The Authors of Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young
American Children
In the early 1960s, Drs. Hart and Risley demonstrated the power of learning principles
influencing young children. Along with a colleague, they introduced parenting techniques such
as time-out. Procedures such as shaping speech and language now widely used in special
education were also introduced by the team.
______________________________________________________________________________
Chapter 5: SSR—sustained silent reading,
reading aloud's silent partner—continued
What are the exact benefits of SSR?
The benefits vary by the individual, but in its simplest form SSR allows a person to read long enough and far
enough so the act of reading becomes automatic. If one must stop to concentrate on each word—sounding it out and
searching for meaning—then fluency is lost along with meaning. It is also fatiguing. Being able to do it
automatically is the goal.9 To achieve this, the Commission on Reading (Becoming a Nation of Readers)
recommended two hours a week of independent reading. Where do you find that time? The commission
recommended less time be spent on skill sheets and workbooks. 10
Because it is supposed to be informal and free of grades, SSR also provides students with a new perspective on
reading—as a form of recreation. Judging from educated adults who come home each evening and think they can
only relax by watching television, there is a critical need for such lessons in childhood.
Restricted to just basals, she'll be ill-prepared
for real reading.
n the secondary level, SSR may not cause an immediate or short term change in student skills (no “quick
fix”), but it can result in positive changes in attitude toward the library, voluntary reading, assigned reading,
and the importance of reading. This affects the amount students read and thus their facility with the
process.11
Younger readers, however, show significant improvement in both attitude and skills with SSR. “Poor readers,”
points out Richard Allington,12 a leading researcher and president of the International Reading Association, “when
given ten minutes a day to read, initially will achieve five hundred words and quickly increase that amount in the
same period as proficiency grows.”13
By third grade, SSR can be the student’s most important vocabulary builder, more so than with basal textbooks or
even daily oral language. The Commission on Reading noted: “Basal readers and textbooks do not offer the same
richness of vocabulary, sentence structure, or literary form as do trade books. . . . A diet consisting only of basal
stories probably will not prepare children well to deal with real literature.” 14 Indeed, about half of the 3,000 most
commonly used words are not even included in K–6 basals.15 As shown in the chart below, printed material
introduces three to six times more rare words than conversation does.
What would cause SSR to fail?
The McCrackens report that most instances where SSR fails are due to:
1.
2.
Teachers (or aides) who are supervising instead of reading
Classrooms that lack enough SSR reading materials
The McCrackens cite the teacher as a critical role model in SSR, reporting widespread imitation by students of the
teacher’s reading habits.16 Students in one class noticed the teacher interrupting her reading to look up words in the
dictionary and began doing the same. When a junior high teacher began to read the daily newspaper each day, the
class began doing the same.
Here's an example of an entire nation that practiced SSR successfully for four decades and then ran into a snag. As
a reading model, Japan has been unrivaled in the world. Its citizens consume enormous amounts of print, and lead
the world in newspaper readership (64 percent of Japanese adults read a daily newspaper, compared to 23 percent in
the U.S.17) Few outsiders, however, understand the reason behind the Japanese numbers: time. No, they get the same
24 hours everyone else gets, but they get them in different doses.
Hours and hours of mass transit time gave the Japanese lots of time for
reading—then the "thumb
tribe" arrived.
Japan's highway tolls have long been among the highest in the world. A U.S. toll of $14 would be $47 in Japan,
unless there's a bridge to cross and then it jumps to $97. The result is that almost everyone takes public
transportation to work, commutes that often average an hour each way. 18 This allows for 120 uninterrupted daily
minutes of either reading or napping. All that time and all that reading put Japan at the top of book, magazine, and
newspaper consumption—that is, until the mid 1990s.
That's when Japanese readership began to drop, and continues to drop. 19 The cause was the arrival of what they
call the "thumb tribe"—commuters with computer games, email, cell phones, and laptops. In short, distractions.
The more distractions confronting a nation, a family, or a class, the less reading accomplished. If you really want
to get more reading done, then take control of your distractions: needless trips to the mall, land phones and cell
phones, multiple televisions, DVD players, emails, computer games—each calling for immediate attention or multitasking. The "thumb tribe" is flourishing in America as well. (For more on the subject of distractions in reading
achievement, see Distractions.)
What about summer-school reading programs?
Further proof of SSR’s benefits is found in the research on “summer setback.” Many parents, especially those
whose children are having difficulty with school, see summertime as a school vacation and take it literally.
“Everyone needs a vacation, for goodness sake. He needs to get away from school and relax. Next year will be a
new start.” That attitude can be extremely detrimental, especially to a poor reader, as the chart below indicates
(SOURCE: Center for
Institute).
Summer Learning, Johns Hopkins
There is an axiom
dumber
in
the
of 3,000 students in
to see if it was true.
top students and
slowly
in
the
worse than slow
reverse, as you can
in education that “you get
summer.” A two-year study
Atlanta, Georgia, attempted
They found that everyone—
poor students—learns more
summer. Some, though, do
down; they actually go into
see in the chart on the right.
20
Top
students’
scores rise slightly between
the end of one
school year and the beginning
of the next. Conversely, the bottom 25 percent (largely urban poor) lose most of what they gained the previous
school year. Average students (middle 50 percent) make no gains during the summer but lose nothing either—except
in the widening gap between themselves and the top students. Projected across the first four years of school, the
"rich-poor" reading gap that was present at the start of kindergarten has actually widened.
Many factors cause the loss. The affluent child's summer includes: a family of readers who model that behavior
and offer quiet spaces conducive to reading; a home that is print-rich with books, magazines, and newspapers; visits
to the mall with stops at the book store or library; a family vacation or summer camp out of town in which new
people, places, and experiences extend background knowledge and offer new vocabulary; and a high probability that
educational or informational TV and radio will be seen and heard.
School's out but if reading is out also, he's in big trouble.
Conversely, the at-risk child's summer includes: a home without books, magazines or newspapers, and without
adults who read avidly; no car by which to leave a dangerous neighborhood; no bookstores or a convenient library; a
daily routine in which the child seldom meets new people, new experiences, or new vocabulary, thus no growth in
background knowledge; and little likelihood that educational or informational TV or radio will be seen or heard.
The adage "If you don’t use it, you lose it," proves true for children who live these kinds of summers. Without
printed material and without new experiences, the reading skills grow rusty and atrophy.
How to prevent the traditional summer reading gap? The research gives little support to traditional summer
school, but a great deal to summer reading—reading to the child and reading by the child. Jimmy Kim's study of
1,600 sixth-graders in 18 schools showed that the reading of four to six books during the summer was enough to
alleviate summer loss. He further noted that when schools required either a report/essay be written about a book read
during the summer or that parents verify a student had read one summer book, this increased greatly the chances of
it being read.21
Most libraries have summer reading incentive programs, so make sure your child is
enrolled and participates. And take your child on field trips—even if you just visit
local places like a fire station, the museum, or the zoo, and talk and listen. One of the
most original solutions I've heard is this one from Paul E. Barton, senior associate in
the Policy Evaluation and Research Center at ETS, and someone who has researched
and written extensively on the subject of poverty and schooling, from preschool to
prisons.22 Barton knows full well the scarcity of books in the lives of poor children
and it provoked him to tell USA Today that at-risk communities should be making
bookmobiles or traveling libraries "as ubiquitous as the Good Humor man." 23
The Lasting Impact of the Verbal Gap
n the Spring of 2003, the Policy Information Center of Educational Testing Service (ETS) published a
report called Reading and Literacy in America, describing the wide and growing literacy gap between
American social classes, one they could trace all the way back to kindergarten. According to ETS research,
little of what occurs between kindergarten and 12th grade changes the chasm of achievement uncovered in the
findings of Hart and Risley:
"Disturbing, however, is the finding that the large differentials in reading scores that we see by the fourth grade
are already there when children enter kindergarten. While 71 percent of White kindergartners — and 80 percent of
Asian kindergartners — could recognize letters of the alphabet when they started in the fall, just 59 percent of Black
and 51 percent of Hispanic kindergartners could do so. [1]
"In terms of race and ethnicity, 40 percent of White fourth graders were proficient in reading, compared with 46
of Asian, 12 percent of Black, and 16 percent of Hispanic fourth graders. In statistical terms of standard deviations,
these differentials are of a similar magnitude to those found in kindergarten and first grade. The differentials present
at the beginning persist through the years of public education.
Updated for adulthood, ETS found the average reading proficiency of Black Americans to be 237 compared to
286 for White Americans. This, in turn, translates into deep economic divisions between the races as shown in the
ETS chart below. In addition, this difference in literacy and income translates into yet another disenfranchisement at
the voting booth where just over 5 in 10 adults who scored at Level 1 voted in the last five years, while 9 in 10 of
those at Level 5 had voted. Simply put: less education translates into less income, which translates into less of a
voice in democracy.
Average Weekly Wage by Reading Level
SOURCE: Paul E. Barton and Archie Lapointe, Learning by Degrees: Indicators of
Performance in Higher Education, Policy Information Center,
Educational Testing Service, 1995. ED 379 323
What Parents Need to Know
The American Medical Association has some specific suggestions on ways
you can help your child with homework:






Help your child get organized. It can be hard to schedule
homework time into your child's busy life, but that is exactly what
you must do. Prioritizing homework tells your child that learning,
reading and studying are important. If you need to, post a weekly
calendar with slots for daily homework time.
Help your child find the right workspace. Where your child
should do homework depends largely on his or her age. The
workspace should be well lighted and supplied with pencils, paper,
rulers and books so your child doesn't waste time hunting for tools.
The kitchen or dining room table is the most popular workspace for
young children.
Let your child do the work. Young children in particular are
accustomed to being helped with many tasks, so they naturally look
to parents for help with homework. Remember that a primary goal
of homework is to build responsibility. Here, yours is a supporting
role as a parent - encouraging your child to think, evaluate and
respond.
Help your child understand instructions, but then step back
and let him or her work independently. It is important that you do
not actually do the work because this denies your child an essential
sense of achievement. Praise should be focused on your child's
effort rather than on "correct" or "incorrect."
Be a parent, not a teacher. The most important role you can play
is as a parent. It is important not to become the teacher at home.
You can scan the assignment first to become familiar with it. That
way, if your child has trouble finding the answer, you can offer a
clue and then let your child find the answer. This approach helps
build your child's confidence that he or she can, indeed, do the work
on his or her own. You should be ready with praise when the
assignment is completed.
Make a final homework check before assignments are
submitted. This not only gives you an indication of your child's
ability, but it also keeps you up-to-date on what he or she is
studying. If you do find errors, don't criticize. If your child is really
struggling, send a note to the teacher pointing out the difficulties
your child had with that assignment. By going over homework with
your child, you can see whether there are any problems that need
to be addressed.
Consider the following research collected by Ron Fairchild, executive director of the Johns Hopkins
University Center for Summer Learning:






All young people experience learning losses when they do not engage in educational
activities during the summer. Research shows that students typically score lower on
standardized tests at the end of summer vacation than they do on the same tests at the
beginning of summer vacation (Cooper, 1996).
On average, students lose approximately 2.6 months of grade-level equivalency in
mathematical computation skills over the summer months. Studies reveal that the
greatest areas of summer loss for all students, regardless of socioeconomic status, are in
factual or procedural knowledge (Cooper, 1996).
Low-income children and youth experience greater summer learning losses than their
higher income peers. On average, middle-income students experience slight gains in
reading performance over the summer months. Low-income students experience an average
summer learning loss in reading achievement of over two months (Cooper, 1996).
Summer learning loss contributes to the achievement gap in reading performance
between lower and higher income children and youth. Research demonstrates that while
student achievement for both middle and lower income students improves at similar rates
during the school year, low-income students experience cumulative summer learning losses
over the elementary school grades (Alexander & Entwisle, 1996).
Large numbers of students who qualify for federally subsidized meals do not have the
same level of access to nutritious meals during the summer as they do during the
school year. Only one in five (21.1 per 100) of the 15.3 million children who receive free or
reduced priced school lunches on a typical day during the regular school year participate in
federal nutrition programs during the summer (Food Research and Action Center, 2002).
Studies show that out-of-school time is a dangerous time for unsupervised children
and teens. They are more likely to use alcohol, drugs and tobacco, engage in criminal and
other high-risk behaviors, receive poor grades and drop out of school than those who have
the opportunity to benefit from constructive activities supervised by responsible adults
(Carnegie Council, 1994).
One study does address normal variation in parenting. Michel Duyme and
colleagues identified a small sample of adopted children (fewer than seventy)
from a review of more than 5,000 adoption cases in France.28 They selected all
children between the ages of four and six who had been placed in prescreened
adoptive homes, removed from their birth parents because of abuse or neglect,
and put in foster care before their adoption. The children were given cognitive
tests before their adoption and again between the ages of eleven and eighteen.
Overall, the children showed striking gains in IQ test scores from early
childhood to adolescence, from a mean score of 77 to 91 (14 points or almost
one standard deviation on a test with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of
15). The authors classified the adoptive households as low, middle, or high
socioeconomic status (SES), based on paternal occupation. The gains were
largest for those placed in high SES families (19 points) and smallest for those
in the low SES families (8 points).29 The assumption is that the high SES
families were providing more language, more teaching, and more materials, all
of which facilitated the children's cognitive growth.
Parent Strategies for Building Oral Vocabulary in Young Children
May 19, 2010 Barbara Abromitis
Father Talking With Young Son - Kouptsova on iStockphoto
Meaningful parent-child interaction is the foundation for a large oral vocabulary, which better prepares
young children for literacy learning in school.
Building a large oral vocabulary will prepare young children for learning to read and write more
than any other school readiness exercises. Parents play a larger role in this language
development, too, than do preschool teachers, however, and once children begin talking, parents
and caregivers can utilize specific strategies to help children learn more words and become more
precise in their thinking and speaking.
When children have a large oral vocabulary, they can easily use their phonemic awareness
(understanding and ability to hear, manipulate, and reproduce the distinct language sounds) and
conceptual understanding of specific words to make the transition from oral to written language
use.
The following guidelines detail three simple strategies parents and caregivers can use when
speaking with young children, which will help them develop higher-level thinking skills and a
larger, more sophisticated oral vocabulary.
Read more at Suite101: Parent Strategies for Building Oral Vocabulary in Young Children
http://www.suite101.com/content/parent-strategies-for-building-oral-vocabulary-in-young-childrena237488#ixzz1861iNnLK
Using Higher Level Questioning
Conversations with young children often follow a basic question-and-answer format that relies
on the adult either asking a basic question and getting a brief response, or the child asking
questions about an immediate situation and the adult providing the answer.
Using higher-level questioning to help the child express his thoughts more completely and
precisely can build oral vocabulary by forcing the use and manipulation of known words to
express new ideas in different ways.
For example, when reading a story to a child, parents can stop occasionally and ask questions
about the characters and their actions, and then use questions and prompts like, "Why do you
think so?", "Can you tell me more about that?", "How would you handle this problem?" or "What
do you think will happen next?" to help children expand their thinking and expressive
vocabulary.
Elaborating on Experiences
By providing preschoolers with many and varied experiences and then helping them elaborate on
them through activities such as the Language Experience Approach, parents and caregivers can
teach new words in the context of the experience and then help children use those words in the
retelling in order to more quickly internalize them.
Read on



Partnering With Parents Through PreK-3 Family Literacy Programs
Basic Phonics for K-3 Teachers and Improved Reading Instruction
Helping Young ESL Students Learn to Read English
After visiting the zoo, where the adult is pointing out animals and using new words to describe
everything that's seen, children can go home and write their own story about the experience by
dictating sentences and having the adult write them down and read them back. In that way, the
link between oral and written language is established and new words are practiced within a
context related to the one in which they were learned.
Extending Experiences Through Reading
Children can learn new vocabulary by extending personal experiences through reading, too.
Taking preschoolers to the library, sharing books, and helping them learn more about topics to
which they've been introduced can also acquaint them with new vocabulary and more conceptual
knowledge about the world around them.
In addition, they can live vicariously through storybook characters, build background knowledge
about a variety of subjects, and begin to internalize story grammar through reading.
Parents and caregivers have an important role to play in the development of oral language and
vocabulary in young children. The extent to which they employ these strategies in conversation
with children may determine the level of language development and the ease in which
preschoolers and primary-aged children are able to transition from oral to written language use.
Read more at Suite101: Parent Strategies for Building Oral Vocabulary in Young Children
http://www.suite101.com/content/parent-strategies-for-building-oral-vocabulary-in-young-childrena237488#ixzz1861vZ7Nd
Partnering With Parents Through PreK-3 Family Literacy Programs
The Best Ways to Connect Families and Classroom Literacy Communities
May 13, 2010 Barbara Abromitis
Father and Son Enjoying a Bedtime Story - woogies1
PreK-3 teachers become more effective when they promote literacy learning at home and at school
through interactive family literacy programs and activities.
Family literacy programs may be as simple as an occasional evening event or as fully developed
as a comprehensive curriculum, depending on the school and the support available. But all
teachers can use a family literacy model to create a classroom literacy community that includes
families in the learning process, and educates and celebrates parents or caregivers, children, and
the ways they interact around reading and writing together.
Family Literacy programs typically are defined by three distinct components: Parent Education,
Child Education, and Parent-Child Interaction. PreK-3 teachers can use this three-pronged
approach to create a more informal family literacy model, which will further enhance their
classroom instruction and any other more formal approach sponsored by the school or district.
Parent Education Component
A key component of any family literacy program is parent education. Parents need to know the
best ways to foster literacy learning outside of school, and why the ways in which they model
reading and writing, and interact with their children around literacy experiences, matter. Creating
a family atmosphere where literacy is valued and practiced will ultimately strengthen the
learning that occurs in the classroom.
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Encouraging parents and caregivers to read to children, and to have children read to them, is just
the beginning. Learning and practicing new ways of questioning, elaborating, explaining and
extending these literacy experiences with their children is also important, and often best done in
small doses. Brief modeling for parents at PTO meetings or other parent nights at school,
monthly newsletters with tips and activity ideas, take-home book bags for with extension
activities included, and family journals are just some ways teachers can incorporate family
literacy principles into their classroom communities.
Child Education Component
Family literacy activities should be instructionally sound for children, too, though the focus
should be on motivating children to read and to have fun with language and literacy. Games such
as Scrabble, Bananagrams, Password, MadLibs, and others that focus on decoding and encoding
words, vocabulary, or parts of speech can help build fluency and comprehension. Child-centered
book clubs, author's fairs, or other literary events can also be a motivating activities for children
and their families.
Parent-Child Interaction
Teachers should also provide parents with a variety of play ideas that provide quality together
time for families, while promoting language development and literacy habits. Besides reading
books together, parents and children can play pretend games that involve reading and writing (a
restaurant with menus to read and orders to write is an example); act out stories; recite, read, and
write simple poetry and fingerplays; participate in Language Experience Approach activities; and
discuss TV shows and movies.
Read on



Using Literacy Stations to Provide Reading and Writing Practice
Do-It-Yourself Free Online Homeschooling Curriculum
Inclusive Classroom Strategies: Teaching ADHD & Autistic Children
Whether or not a school has a formal, sponsored family literacy program in place, parents and
family members do have an impact on PreK-3 literacy learning. By using the same structure as
more formal family literacy programs, teachers can implement their own less formal, but still
effective, parent and child education components that provide motivation for literacy
involvement outside of school, while enhancing the interactions shared by families around the
inherently engaging activities of reading and writing.
Further Reading
Read more at Suite101: Partnering With Parents Through PreK-3 Family Literacy Programs: The Best
Ways to Connect Families and Classroom Literacy Communities
http://www.suite101.com/content/partnering-with-parents-through-prek-3-family-literacy-programsa192926#ixzz1862SfWY6
At-Home Literacy Activities for PreK-6 Children
Reading and Writing Strategies for Promoting Family Literacy
May 9, 2009 Barbara Abromitis
Mother and Son Reading Together - mammamaart
Children can learn and improve their reading and writing skills when parents make literacy a focus in the
home and together, become engaged in family literacy practices.
Parents are the first and best teachers of literacy by the example they set, and by the emphasis
they place on reading and writing practices in the home. When children witness the importance
of good literacy habits and are immersed in a literacy-rich environment, they become motivated
to learn oral and written language, and to use these language skills regularly for their own
purposes. Most importantly, their practice leads to greater proficiency and enjoyment.
Family Literacy
Family literacy was a term coined in the early 1980s that refers to the everyday literacy practices
that occur in the home, and researchers such as Denny Taylor (1998) have long documented
what parents do to extend their children’s literacy learning. However, in recent years, the term
has referred to programs offered through schools, which have an adult education component, a
child education component, and an adult-child activity designed to be done together.
But family literacy cannot be relegated to a specific evening or program. Literacy practices are
woven into the fabric of everyday life, and children learn the most from watching what their
parents do, or don’t do. Choosing to read for information and enjoyment, writing notes to
friends, visiting the library regularly, discussing favorite authors, pointing out letters, sounds,
signs and labels – all these are examples of the ways literacy can be emphasized every day.
Read more at Suite101: At-Home Literacy Activities for PreK-6 Children: Reading and Writing Strategies
for Promoting Family Literacy http://www.suite101.com/content/athome-literacy-activities-for-prek6children-a89803#ixzz1868UYaZV