Hart and Risley’s Three Key Findings:



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:right0right0"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, HYPERLINK "" \l "chptone17" 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?right0right0right0right0right0The researchers began by identifying 42 normal families representing three socioeconomic groups: welfare, working class, and professional. Beginning when the children were seven months old, researchers visited the homes for one hour a month, and continued their visits for two and one-half years. During each visit, the researcher tape-recorded and transcribed by hand any conversations and actions taking place in front of the child.Through 1,300 hours of visits, they accumulated 23 million bytes of information for the project database, categorizing every word (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) said in front of the child. 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. right0right0right0left0hen the daily number of words for each group of children was projected across four years, the four-year-old child from the professional family will have heard 45 million words, the working-class child 26 million, and the welfare child only 13 million. All three children will show up for kindergarten on the same day, but one will have heard 32 million fewer words. If No Child Left Behind expects the teacher to get this child caught-up, she'll have to speak 10 words a second for 900 hours to reach the 32-million mark by year's end. I hope they have life support ready for her. 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 two-year-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.19If 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 StudyMeaningful 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 talked to their children, the faster the children’s vocabularies were growing and the higher the children’s IQ test scores at age three and later.” “The data revealed that the most important aspect of children’s language experience is its amount.” “Differences in the amount of cumulative experience children had?... were strongly linked to differences at age three in children’s rates of vocabulary growth, vocabulary use, and general accomplishments and strongly linked to differences in school performance at age nine.” Betty Hart, Ph.D. and Todd R. Risley, Ph.D.The Authors of Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American ChildrenIn 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-preparedfor real reading.left0n 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.11Younger readers, however, show significant improvement in both attitude and skills with SSR. “Poor readers,” points out Richard Allington, HYPERLINK "" \l "chptfive12" 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.”13By 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: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 "thumbtribe" 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 multi-tasking. 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 Summer Learning, Johns Hopkins Institute). right0right0right0There is an axiom in education that “you get dumber in the summer.” A two-year study of 3,000 students in Atlanta, Georgia, attempted to see if it was true. They found that everyone—top students and poor students—learns more slowly in the summer. Some, though, do worse than slow down; they actually go into reverse, as you can see in the chart on the right. 20Top 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.21left0left0???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."23The Lasting Impact of the Verbal Gapleft0n 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 left0left0SOURCE: Paul E. Barton and Archie Lapointe, Learning by Degrees: Indicators of Performance in Higher Education, Policy Information Center,Educational Testing Service, 1995. ED 379 323What 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 ChildrenMay 19, 2010 Barbara Abromitis Father Talking With Young Son - Kouptsova on iStockphotoMeaningful 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 Higher Level QuestioningConversations 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 ExperiencesBy 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 ReadingChildren 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 With Parents Through PreK-3 Family Literacy ProgramsThe Best Ways to Connect Families and Classroom Literacy Communities May 13, 2010 Barbara Abromitis Father and Son Enjoying a Bedtime Story - woogies1PreK-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 ComponentA 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.Ads by GoogleLiteracy Strategies For Your Elementary Teachers Free Sample Chapters Here ElemLiteracyChild's Color Keyboard Mouse, Headphone & Keyboard Cover All at a Great Price. Bundle 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 ComponentFamily 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 InteractionTeachers 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 ReadingRead more at Suite101: Partnering With Parents Through PreK-3 Family Literacy Programs: The Best Ways to Connect Families and Classroom Literacy Communities HYPERLINK "" At-Home Literacy Activities for PreK-6 ChildrenReading and Writing Strategies for Promoting Family Literacy May 9, 2009 Barbara Abromitis Mother and Son Reading Together - mammamaartChildren 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 LiteracyFamily 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 ................
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