Family Literacy
If you could change two things…
• Jot them down on a
piece of paper….
Think about strengths and needs
• What are your parents already doing to help
support their children at school?
• What do your parents need so that they
could be more supportive?
What do WE have control over?
What are potential roadblocks?
• Jot them down on a
piece of paper….
Parent Involvement is
Important
• Regardless of socioeconomic status,
ethnic/racial background or parents’
educational level
• Behavior is more pro-social and positive
and academics are significantly better
when parents are involved
Parents as Models
• Don’t ask parents to create an artificial
literacy environment. Have them use what
they already have.
– Reading newspapers, TV guides, crossword
puzzles (Purcell-Gates, 1996)
• Parents can share the reading of these materials with
their child. Show the child how these types of text are
beneficial.
– Parents with low literacy can focus on oral retelling
of family events, and making up stories to go
along with picture books (Wolter, 1995)
– Parents should begin reading to their child even
before the child can speak (Purcell-Gates, 1996)
How Parents Can Help
• Oral language/vocabulary development
• Home literacy environment
• Development and support of desired
behaviors
– Academic (homework) and behavioral
• Writing
Effective Family Literacy Nights
• The whole family should be involved - everyone
should feel welcome and useful
• Families can be recruited - newspaper, radio,
school bulletins
• Scheduling, transportation and child care issues
should be addressed, and solutions provided
– Parents generally only attend 30% of the sessions.
They need to go in order for the activities to be
implemented.
Overview
• (1) Developing the Home-School Connection
• (2) Homework Night
• (3) Behaviors That Are Important for School Success
• (4) Oral Language – Having Conversations
• (5) Oral Language - Classroom Tour
• (6) Oral Language – Oral Family Traditions
• (7) Oral Language - Reading Aloud
• (8) Non-fiction Night
• (9) Writing Night
Session Structure
• First week of the month.
• In preparation for the following month, teachers
should meet and plan for the next session in the
third week.
• Each session will begin with a quick review of
the prior session and Q & A that emphasizes
family input.
• Each night teachers or other staff model literacy
behavior that is being taught during that session.
Session Structure
• Children are dropped off in their
classrooms with their teacher.
• Parents go to common meeting place for
overview and lecture portion.
• Parents go to classroom and join their
children for the associated activity.
Session Structure
• Families take home a calendar of seven
possible activities. An artifact is produced
and brought back to the next session.
• To encourage parents to attend and take
part in literacy activities throughout the
month, a small reward will be given to the
family when they produce evidence of
having completed 4 out of 7 activities.
Workshop #1 – Developing the Home
School Connection
• Welcome- Mission and Vision – School’s
goals for every child.
• Importance of family involvement.
• Stress the importance of attendance at
each session throughout the year.
Workshop #1 – Developing the Home School Connection
• Are there any issues that will prevent
regular attendance?
– Transportation issues?
– Time of the day?
– Who is invited?
– Child care?
– Food?
Workshop #1 – Developing the Home School Connection
• Offer ideas and suggestions to parents to
get print resources into their homes.
– Lending Library
– School Library
– Universities and Colleges
– Book Swap Club
Activity for the Session
• Make a Book
Efficacy of Homework
• Homework is not the great equalizer
• Homework is not always effective
– How much and how often depends on the support at
home and the age/grade of the student
• Students need to be able to complete the
assignment independently
– The parent needs to be made aware of the how the
assignment should be completed
– Homework should not result in stress for the parent
and/or child
– Homework should be completed by the child
Homework: How Parents
Can Help
•
•
•
•
•
Foster independence
Problem-solving
Quiet environment
Placing value on academics
Homework could be done before we go
home
Workshop #2- Homework
• Monthly Teacher Meeting
– When the teachers meet together to plan the
upcoming homework family literacy night they should
be encouraged to discuss the following:
• Homework should be something the students do
independently
• Parent support should be designed to support autonomy
– Not doing the homework or teaching the student how to do the
assignment
Activity for the Session
• Make a homework calendar
– The student will write down the homework
assignment each day at take it home with him/her
(parents should be looking at this daily)
– Parents can help the students schedule their activities
•
•
•
•
Sports
Clubs
School
Play
• Discuss at least 5 ways that the home
environment can be structure to accommodate
quiet study
– Teachers can help problem solve at this time
Behavior
• Children with more secure attachments respond
better to family literacy programs (St. Pierre,
Ricciulti & Rimdzius, 2005)
– Parent discipline (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002)
• Low SES parents are more likely to spank or use harsh
punishments with their child
• Coercive environment with negative reinforcement being
most often used
– Use Positive Behavior Support
• Negative reinforcement trap
• Behavioral expectations
Workshop #3 – Behaviors That Are
Important for School Success
• First 10-15 minutes of the night should be
used to discuss the first session and
answer any questions that the parents
may have.
Workshop #3 – Behaviors That Are Important for School Success
• Goals for this workshop
–
–
–
–
Classroom Rules
Mission Statement
Description of positive behaviors for school success
Discuss how parents can support those positive
behaviors
– Discuss how the desired behaviors at school are the
same and different from desired behaviors in different
situations
– Discuss how the parents can support appropriate
positive behaviors when the child is not at school
Workshop #3 – Behaviors That Are Important for School Success
• This means that teachers need to know
and be able to discuss…
– School rules
– Classroom rules
– How they are the same or different
– The implied, but unwritten rules
Activity for the Session
• Parents break into small groups.
• Discussion of things that their children do that
are inappropriate or cause problems at home.
• Working together, come up with better
replacement behaviors for the child.
– Discuss how the behaviors needed for school
success can be supported at home.
– They problem-solve this together, instead of having
the session leader tell them what they should be
doing.
Oral Language and
Reading Comprehension
• A student’s oral language skills in
kindergarten is a very good indicator of
how well they will be able to comprehend
written language in fourth and seventh
grade (Snow, Burns & Griffin, 1998)
Oral Language and Decoding
• Oral language skills help facilitate acquisition of
early decoding skills (Connor, Morrison & Katch,
2004)
• Kindergarten vocabulary level also influences
phonological awareness, even after controlling
for parent literacy, invented spelling, listening
comprehension and alphabetic knowledge
(Sénéchal et al., 2006)
Language in the Home
• Student that come from a home with
less sophisticated language and less
frequent conversations, come to school
with smaller vocabularies (Biemiller,
2006)
– The home literacy environment
accounts for the most variance in
emergent literacy skills (Jordon et al.,
2000)
Language in the Home
• Children in low SES homes hear fewer than
100 different vocabulary words in one hour high SES hear over 500 different words (Hart
& Risley, 1995)
• Number of words heard by age 3
– Professional - 40 million
– Working class - 20 million
– Welfare - 10 million
• Vocabulary knowledge (White, Graves &
Slater, 1990)
– Low SES 3rd graders - 10,000 words
– High SES 3rd graders - 15,000 words
Workshop # 4 – Oral Language
Having Conversations
• Quick review
• Conversations- an explanation of oral
language development and how having
conversations benefits literacy learning.
Activity for the Session
• Have a conversation with your child about
what you do at work, or at school or at
home while your child is at school. Include
details regarding things you find
rewarding, challenging or difficult. Ask
your child to share his or her thoughts on
the subject.
Activity for Home
• As a family, plan an activity that you will do
on the weekend. Discuss and make a list
of things to bring.
Activities for Home
• Build your child’s awareness of language by
checking out and sharing a joke or riddle book
from the library. If your child does not
understand why the joke is funny, explain it to
him.
• Read a book together with your child that has
been made into a movie. After reading the book,
watch the movie together. Have a conversation
about what was the same or different in each.
Workshop #5 – Oral
Language/Classroom Tour
• Quick review
• Prior to the event, students and teacher
work together to construct an agenda that
will lead the families through the evening’s
activities.
• Families move throughout the classrooms
in a planned and organized fashion,
according to the prepared agenda.
Workshop #5 – Oral
Language/Classroom Tour
• When the family is ready to leave, have
someone take a photo of the family with
the teacher. After it is developed, post one
copy in the classroom and send another
copy home with the child. Have the child
write a paragraph that explains how
learning happens at school and at home.
Workshop #6 – Oral LanguageOral Family Traditions
• Quick Review
• Telling Stories
– Children learn about themselves and others
through hearing and telling family stories.
– Adults can purposefully use rich language to
describe family events from the past.
Activity for the Session
• Make a Timeline
– Parent creates a timeline of his life beginning
at birth and ending with “Today”. Through
conversation, parent adds significant events
to the timeline.
– Child is encouraged to ask questions as
parent tells about life events.
– Child illustrates the timeline by drawing
pictures that represent stories told as the
timeline was created.
Workshop #7- Read Alouds
•
•
•
•
Teaching method for sharing a story
Used to develop vocabulary
Model story structure and reading fluency
Introducing new content
Scaffolding of Read Aloud
• Non-readers and emergent readers
– Parents read the story to the child, with the child
being encouraged to interact and ask questions
• Beginning readers
– Parents will read the story to the child, with the child
be encouraged to read words that he/she is familiar
with
• More experienced readers
– The child can read to the parents, with the parents
providing corrective feedback when he/she misses a
word
Sample Questions for
Read Aloud
• Younger, less proficient readers
– Alphabetic principle questions
• Ask the child to provide the sound that a letter
makes
– Written conventions
• The parent can point out punctuation to the child,
and then later ask the child to identify commas,
periods, etc.
Workshop #7- Read Alouds
• Older, more proficient readers
– Fluency
• If the child is reading, the parent should help the child
maintain fluency and use the sentence grammar
– Remind the child to pause at the end of a sentence and after a
comma
– Comprehension
• If there is an idiom or concept that the parent does not think
the child understands is encountered in the text the meaning
should be discussed
Probes for Comprehension
• Did this story end the way you thought it
would?
– If yes, what clues in the story helped you
predict what was going to happen?
– If not, how was the ending different than you
thought it would be?
• What questions do you still have about the
story?
Activity for the Session
• After the overview
– Parents should have an opportunity to ask questions
• Parent then models the activity for the group
with his/her child
– The parent should have volunteered earlier to do this,
and be familiar with the book
– Other parents in the group can discuss the read aloud
after the parent is finished
– The session leader (classroom teacher) can provide
feedback, but it should be framed positively
Workshop #8-Working with
Nonfiction Text
• Benefits of Nonfiction Text
– Used to convey information about things in
the immediate environment and world.
– Help show students how to include factual
details, vary sentence length and complexity,
use different language.
Teacher Demonstration
• The teacher should model an interactive
editing lesson based on the IAW/IAE book
– The teacher can choose which type of
interactive editing lesson to do with the
parents, but this should be the same type that
the parents are then asked to do with their
children later in the night.
Activity for the Session
• The parent should then interactively edit a
piece of text with their child
• Parents will be given one of the worksheets
from the IAW/IAE book (depending on the
activity the teacher has chosen)
– The teacher will provide feedback and support
during the parent-child activity
• The parent should be encouraged to choose
and edit another piece of information with
their child during the month
– The can bring the edited piece to the next family
literacy night
Writing
• Reading and writing skills are acquired
simultaneously, and are equally
important in emergent literacy (SaintLaurent & Giasson, 2005)
• Writing activities should be introduced
early in the child’s life
– Parents should provide the least amount of
support necessary
Parent Support for Writing
• Provide writing material, or could the
school provide this?
• Promote writing
• Help with editing of writing
– Grammatical correction
– Help the child elaborate on their writing and
clarify content
Workshop #9- Writing
• Introduction to Parents
• Writing is a method of communication
– Letter formation and letter writing are the beginnings
of alphabetic principle
• Writing exits on a continuum
– Parents should be given the developmental stages
from the Shared Reading book
• Correct letter formation
– Parents receive the handwriting model, which can
later be used by parents to help model and correct
their child’s letter formation
Activities for the Session
• For younger children
– Use the handwriting model to write the alphabet
– Parent models the upper and lower case letter
– The child then writes the letter under the model,
with the parent allowing the child to practice
• For very young children, the letter may look more like
scribbling
• The session leader should monitor the letter
writing activity, and help parents use the
stages of writing handout to assess where
the child it at.
– Help the parents set reasonable expectations for
the child
• The child should be allowed to draw a picture
to go with each letter
Activities
• Older Children - constructing a letter
– The child should choose someone that he/she knows
and would like to write a letter to
– After choosing a person to write a letter to, the parent
should help the child write a letter to that person
– Parent should use the handwriting guide and the
stages of writing handout to help assess the child
– The parent can give suggestions for different
vocabulary,and provide some suggestions
– The child can add illustrations if desired
Family CELL-ebration Night
• Families bring favorite
artifacts to this meeting.
• They are given a piece of
poster board and tape or
glue to display their work.
• After writing their names
and decorating, families
display their
accomplishments and talk
about their successes
with each other.