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What Can Family Literacy Look Like?
What
can we do at home? This list of suggested activities is short, and is designed only as a springboard for your own ideas. Begin
with an activity you can do easily and comfortably with your children. Then add those activities that work especially well
for you and your children.
from NCTE's Parent's Guide to Literacy for the 21st Century:
* Let your children
see you reading for pleasure. Share some vocabulary or great phrases, a character, or even part of the story line with them.
See if there are any similarities with books that your children are reading.
* Talk to your children about how
your parents read to you or told you stories.
* Let your children see you write for pleasure. Send family letters
to relatives or friends. Let everyone in the family contribute a part or an illustration.
* When you're riding
in the car, tell your children a story about when you were little, or tell them a story about something that happened at work
that day. Leave off the ending and let them provide an ending.
* Have your children select three things they want
included in the story. Make up a story that includes those three things. For example, the selections might be a princess,
a race car, and an ice cream cone. The children will love helping you find clever ways to include three things in the story.
* When you pass a rock formation, landmark, building, or street sign, take turns with the children thinking up a legend behind
the name or creation of the item. Even though you might all be familiar with the actual background story, making one up is
lots of fun. At night, you might think up legends for the face in the moon. Follow up these storytelling events with a trip
to the library to find out legends from other countries or groups.
* Try different ambiances for your readalouds
or storytelling. If it's a scary story, for example, tell it in the dark or read it with flashlights. If it's a story about
when one of your children was an infant, bring out an old toy and hold it as you tell the story.
* Try themes in
your family literacy events. This works naturally with holidays, but lots of different themes can be used any time. If your
family has chosen popcorn as a theme, look through magazines for pictures of popcorn; make a collage of places where you might
eat popcorn; find packaged foods in the grocery store that contain popcorn; list all the different kinds of popcorn available;
pop some popcorn, with everyone helping to read the recipe; trade popcorn stories (when did you first string popcorn, or
first eat it in the movie theater) and make a little book of those stories; select books (fiction and nonfiction) that have
to do with popcorn and read them aloud.
* Make a family book that is a collection of stories: favorites retold
generation after generation or stories of family events (first visit by the tooth fairy). Any time that stories are recorded,
younger children can dictate to an older family member.
* When you go on a trip, keep a family journal, writing
down impressions and events, keeping postcards or illustrations, noting unusual names for places, or recording strange stories
from different places.
* Keep a list on the refrigerator of foods that need to be bought at the grocery store.
Have children held add to the list and, when you go shopping, have the children read the list, find the items, read packages
for information, and check items off the list.
* Keep a little note pad or recycled pieces of paper next to the
telephone. Use that area as a message center where family members can leave telephone messages or other notes to each other.
You can even turn the message center into a little post office with little boxes or pockets for each family member.
* Keep a family calendar in a central place, such as the family message center. The best calendars for this are the ones with
large boxes for each day so that your children can enter their own special dates or draw pictures as reminders.
* If you watch the news on television, discuss the news with your children; compare the television or radio news to an article
in the newspaper.
* When you watch a movie, talk about the characters, about how important the setting (time and
place) were in the movie, about the sequence of events. Ask how the movie compares with a book and discuss an alternative
you or the children might have written for the movie.
* Discuss television viewing with your children and then
have your children use the television guide to make a daily chart of programs they will watch. Read the short summaries of
plots and descriptions of programs.
* Use whatever the children have watched on television to connect to books.
Help the children find books that give more information about something that has interested them on television.
* Members of older generations make wonderful readers for young children, and children also make wonderful readers for older
listeners. Children can read their own writing, a favorite story, or magazines and newspapers. Two or more generations can
collaborate on a story or book. Using special paper to write on or binding it makes the book even more special.
* Have a bookmark-making party. Have each family member write his or her name on a piece of paper and list favorite topics
or books. Place all the papers in a box and have each member drawn a name and design a bookmark specially for that other family
member.
Visit the NCTE Site NCTE Parent's Guide to Family Literacy
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The Family Literacy Model
According
to Sharon Darling, President of the National Center for Family Literacy, the four-component family literacy model is intended
to:
...promote intergenerational learning as an effective means to break the cycle of poverty and undereducation. Family
literacy provides self-sufficiency for multiple generations simultaneously. When parents and children work together, the parents
have the opportunities to gain the skills to fulfill their roles as parents, workers and citizens. Children gain academic
readiness and reading skills to be successful learners in our schools (Darling, 2000).
Recent legislation provided
a definition of family literacy that is used in all federal programs that offer family literacy services. While Even Start
is the premier federal family literacy program, family literacy services are allowable in programs such as Head Start, Title
I, Adult Education and Reading First. Federal family literacy services are defined as follows:
Services provided to
participants on a voluntary basis that are of sufficient intensity, in terms of hours, and of sufficient duration to make
sustainable changes in a family, and that integrate all of the following activities: interactive literacy activities between
parents and their children; training for parents regarding how to be the primary teacher for their children and full partners
in the education of their children; parent literacy training that leads to economic self-sufficiency; and age-appropriate
education to prepare children for success in school and life experiences. (Public Law 105-277).
One of the assumptions
underlying the family literacy model is that a child will benefit more from being in a family that participates in each family
literacy service (early childhood education, adult education, parenting education and parent-child literacy activities), than
from simply participating in an early childhood program. A model of family literacy theory described by St.Pierre, Ricciuti,
Tao, et al (2003) predicts that family literacy programs such as Even Start will produce short-term positive effects on the
literacy skills of children and parents who participate intensively in early childhood education and adult education services,
as well as short-term positive effects on parenting skills and the home literacy environment due both to participation in
parenting education and parent-child literacy activities (Figure 2.1). Early effects on child literacy skills and on parenting
skills and household literacy resources, as well as enhanced parent literacy skills and enhanced economic outcomes for the
family (e.g., improved parent education, better employment, increased household income) all are hypothesized to lead to longer
term positive effects on the literacy skills of children in the family and continued enhancement of economic outcomes.
Dept of Education Model
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