Invitations to Families in an Early Literacy Support Program

Abstract

Teachers know that when families are involved meaningfully in schools, students perform better in academic, behavioral, and emotional domains. This article describes a project designed to enhance the quality of children's literacy interactions with family members and simultaneously increase family involvement at school. The level of participation of a classroom teacher is key in implementing a family literacy support program in a low‐income neighborhood.

Community-Based Family Literacy Program: Comparing Different Durations and Family Characteristics

“…This study found that family literacy programs are efficacious in improving family and child reading and literacy practices as other previous studies have shown [8,17,20,21,31,42]. The current study took a step further to investigate the role of different durations of the program and family characteristics.…”

“…There is a connection between family involvement (or lack of involvement) and the development of early language and literacy skills and future success in school [8,9]. A mother's literacy level is a significant predictor of a child's future success in school and adults with lower literacy skills are less likely to read to their children [3].…”

“…Involvement in community-based family literacy programs can enhance the literacy of the entire family [8,17]. Hannon [18] proposed a "cycle of literacy" model to describe family literacy programs.…”

Children and Adolescents From Poverty and Reading Development: A Research Review

“…In addition, the program enabled parents to help their children with school activities and increased parents' confidence in their own reading abilities. Waldbart, Meyers, and Meyers's (2006) Bridges to Literacy program fosters the reading development of poor children by forging a connection between schools and poor families. The Bridges to Literacy project works to increase parent-child literacy interactions and to promote schoolfamily collaboration in reading development.…”

Reading achievement in a large urban school district : an analysis of the effects of four reading programs on the reading growth of four reading ability groups.

“…Unfortunately, as previously mentioned, many do not see the importance nor honor the literacy learning that is present in minority low-income homes (Waldbart et al, 2006). …”