The following strategies, from our full research brief “Partnering with Families for Early Language and Literacy,” are drawn from the research literature on effective family engagement in early literacy instruction. They offer opportunities for educators to build stronger partnerships with families to support children’s language and literacy acquisition.
- Welcome families as partners. Language and literacy development for young children begins at home and is nurtured by family members. Research demonstrates that family support for language and literacy activities at home is positively related to children’s outcomes, including reading acquisition, language, vocabulary learning, conceptual development, and literacy achievement.
- Try it: Provide online or in-person spaces for families to get to know other families and to talk to one another about how they support language and literacy growth at home.
- Promote family-friendly practices. Children’s motivation to read impacts the amount of reading they do and their reading outcomes. Therefore, literacy activities provided to families and children to complete outside of school should be enjoyable. Teachers should avoid asking families to "teach" reading at home. Instead, they should share how informal activities like storytelling, singing songs, and talking at mealtimes help to build children's readiness for literacy learning at school. Unconstrained language activities at home promote significant gains for children and build families' sense of efficacy for engaging their children in literacy activities.
- Try it: Help families access books in the school and community through the library or other organizations, such as the Ohio Imagination Library, which provides free books monthly to enrolled children. Bring books and literacy events to parks, laundromats, and grocery stores. Send home literacy bags with reading activities, guided discussion bookmarks, or journals to help families respond to the stories together.
- Share information and tools with families. All families care about their children, and many families want to know more about how to support their children’s learning, particularly with language and literacy. Teachers can provide families with techniques including (1) pausing for the child’s comments between pages; (2) letting the child pick the reading location; (3) increasing the child’s opportunities to physically interact with the book; (4) matching reading to the child’s abilities and interests and modifying the story or discussion to make it more enjoyable; and (5) asking the child to “read” the book to the parent/caregiver, even if the child is making up a story rather than actually reading.
- Try it: Send video links to families showing effective shared reading practices. The Regional Education Laboratory Southeast provides a series of videos for families scaffolding parent and caregiver engagement in language and literacy development activities.
- Invite families to partner in progress monitoring. As teachers monitor and measure children’s literacy skill development, communication with families is important. Families need understandable descriptions about their children’s progress in their ordinary home language, without the use of technical literacy terms. Assessment scores should always be provided with clear explanations of their interpretation and implications. Families benefit from having a perspective of how their children are progressing related to their peers, grade-level standards, and their own prior performance.
- Try it: Establish two-way communication from the first contact with families. Plan to include time in every meeting for families to pose questions and share their ideas.
- Build accessible and equitable home-school partnerships. Teachers should adopt the perspective of a “learner” to get to know their students' and families' unique cultural and familial knowledge – called “funds of knowledge.” This knowledge can be used to create appropriate and engaging literacy lessons for their students. It is also important that teachers provide and recommend books to families that feature people from diverse racial and cultural backgrounds. This is important for all children from all communities. Children benefit from learning about cultures different from their own, and children from minoritized groups make more rapid literacy gains and develop a positive self-concept when they read books about people from their own race and culture.
- Try it: Request that families share information about their funds of knowledge. One way is to use a handout or survey to collect families’ interests, skills, and home routines. Use this knowledge to view students and families through a strengths-based lens.
- Enhance family partnerships for children learning English. Diversity and cultural differences are assets for our schools and communities. Schools should seek out and develop relationships with bilingual/multilingual families through staff or community members. These "cultural brokers" for family engagement can build connections with families to support literacy in their home language and English. Teachers should encourage families to use their first language at home, both for speaking and reading if that is the language they are most comfortable using. Reading in a home language facilitates reading skills in English.
- Try it: Provide books in the home language of families or send home books that are translated to create dual language books. Some texts in languages other than English can be found through the International Children’s Digital Library.
- Individualize partnerships for meeting reading challenges. There are special considerations when it comes to partnerships with families of children who need literacy instruction beyond the core instruction provided to all students. It is critical to carefully consider the way that families are approached at each juncture in the reading intervention process to form relationships based on trust and to optimize student success. Families should be viewed as equal partners and empowered to be a part of the problem-solving process, the development of goals and effective interventions, the identification of potential barriers to achievement, and the monitoring of progress.
- Try it: Provide families with ordinary explanations (e.g., using demonstration videos) of intervention activities and strategies so that families can support learning activities at home.
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