Archive for Family Literacy

The Indiana Department of Education has released its suggested summer reading list, which educators hope will inspire students to keep reading even when school is out, according to The Associated Press. The list on the department's website contains 100 book titles for students of all ages and adults. Some books feature Abraham Lincoln in advance of the Lincoln bicentennial celebration in 2009. Others relate to current events like the Olympics.

State schools chief Suellen Reed says summer reading improves students' academic performance in several subjects. She also hopes adults read over the summer to serve as role models for their children. The list is available online.

On April 24, Toyota announced that four Oakland elementary schools will be among the newest sites for its Toyota Family Literacy Program (TFLP). TFLP,
the first nationwide program of its kind to focus on the needs of Hispanic and other immigrant families, is coordinated by the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL), the country’s leading advocate for family literacy.

TFLP, which got its start in 2003 and is now functioning in 20 cities across the United States, aims to increase basic language and literacy skills among Hispanic and other immigrant families, and provide parents with the skills they need to help their children succeed in school. The program specifically serves children in kindergarten to third grade and their parents. TFLP is unique in that it incorporates NCFL’s multicultural family literacy model, which combines key components including: ESL courses, children’s education, parenting education, Parent and Child Together (PACT) activities, and computer-literacy instruction. Since its inception, Toyota’s commitment to the program exceeds US$35 million. Read more about TFLP on the Toyota website.

A new free family literacy resource will be available in Spanish in time to celebrate El Día de los Niños, the holiday April 30 that recognizes children as the center of the Latino family. The celebration also is known as El Día de los Libros (The Day of the Books). To mark the event, the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) is unveiling the Spanish version of Cultivating Readers (Cultivando el hábito de la lectura), which provides activities for parents to support their child’s literacy, language and reading skills.

The 16-page magazine includes activities and strategies to increase the reading readiness and school success specifically for three age groups—infants and toddlers, preschoolers, and students from kindergarten through grade three.
For more on the magazine, visit NCFL’s website.

Less than half of fathers (42%) said they were bedtime story readers, compared with 76% of mothers, according to a poll of more than 2,000 adults conducted for the United Kingdom's National Year of Reading and reported on BBC News. More than half of fathers blamed long work hours and stress.

"Boys need to see their dads enjoying reading if they are to become readers themselves as they grow up," said Honor Wilson-Fletcher, director of the National Year of Reading. "Football programmes, blogs, newspapers, and sports magazines are just as valuable reading as fairy tales."

For further information, read the full article or visit the National Year of Reading website.

My motives for starting our family’s tradition of reading in the car were purely selfish: I could not bear the thought of listening to “A Sesame Street Christmas” for another 10 hours. My children had latched onto this cassette on our previous summer’s road trip, and Oscar the Grouch’s rendition of “I Hate Christmas” ran through my mind for days afterward.

As I began to gather toys and trinkets to entertain my three young children on our next 500-mile car trip, I came across a book I had purchased but never opened, Jim Trelease’s The Read Aloud Handbook. Before long, I was sitting cross-legged on the floor, engrossed in his book and assertion that reading aloud doesn’t need to end with picture books and that very young children will listen to chapter books.

This could be the answer to my problem, I thought. Dubious but desperate, I tucked a paperback copy of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach into my trip entertainment bag. We had barely cleared the city limits when whining set in. I opened the paperback and began to read aloud the tale of the orphaned boy who escapes his wicked aunts by hiding inside a giant peach. See what happens in The Christian Science Monitor online.

Educators spend most of their money on students, but three King County elementary schools in Washington state recently won $600,000 to spend on teaching parents as well as their children. On February 13, 2008, White Center Heights, Beverly Park, and Mount View elementary schools—all in the Highline School District—were the latest U.S. schools to formally win money and support from the Toyota Family Literacy Program, a nationally led initiative designed to develop an entire family’s English-language skills.

As part of the effort, the program brings parents into elementary classrooms with their children and into separate classes to work on their own. The program’s obvious goal is improving literacy for parents and students, but it also focuses on arguably the most important factor in a student’s success: parental involvement. Read more in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Tom Loveless, senior fellow and director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, has been making trouble again. His latest report asks, “How Well Are American Students Learning?” It upends hitherto highly regarded research based on data from several countries that says more time for instruction and homework has a negative correlation with achievement—in other words, the more teaching at school and more homework at home, the less you learn.

In the holiday spirit of giving, education columnist Jay Mathews of The Washington Post shares some of the ideas he has been gathering for getting beyond the homework standoff. One of them is that elementary students should get only reading homework and nothing else. Read more at washingtonpost.com.

How does a local family literacy program continue without the federal dollars that helped create and sustain it for more than a decade? In a word: S-c-r-a-b-b-l-e.

Madison Family Literacy—which helps poor families develop literacy skills and prepare their children for kindergarten—is hoping to raise $50,000 with an all-city/all-campus Scrabble tournament, according to Patricia La Cross, who coordinates the East Madison program based at the Northport/Packer Community Learning Center in Madison, Wisconsin.

Federal funding for the Madison effort will end in June, and it is not yet known if more federal money will be available, La Cross said. Rather than waiting until that federal support disappears, La Cross said, the program is looking for new sources of money to maintain its existing level of services to about 100 families a year. Read the story in The Wisconsin State Journal online.

Welsh parents read more bedtime stories to their children than anyone else in the United Kingdom, while parents in southern England read the least, research published November 15, 2007, shows. Figures highlight a disparity across the UK in the number of children under six who are read to. A total of 83% of parents in Wales read to their child at night while only 51% of parents in the south of England and London do. In the north of England and the Midlands the figure is far higher at 73% and 70% respectively. In second place is Scotland with 71%. In Northern Ireland, 67% of parents read bedtime stories. In the UK as a whole, 75% of parents asked said they read to their children at bedtime. Read more at icWales.co.uk.

When adults have trouble reading, they can’t teach their kids how to read. This vicious cycle of illiteracy is huge when you consider that more than 30 million adults in the United States have reading skills that are “below basic.” To help break these disturbing trends, the National Center for Family Literacy is partnering with Half Price Books to publish the 13th edition of Say Good Night to Illiteracy. It’s a beautifully illustrated children’s book of poems and short stories that raises money to support literacy projects. The hardcover book is a bargain at $4.98. “It’s one of the most imaginative, beautiful kids’ books that I’ve ever seen,” says Aeron Johnson, an assistant manager at Half Price Books–East in Madison, Wisconsin. Read about the book in The Capital Times.

A literacy program for children waiting to visit incarcerated relatives has been given extended life, thanks in part to donors and volunteers. “Start with A Story” is the brainchild of Lisa Harris, who runs the inmate literacy service at Santa Rita Jail. She originally had enough books to last through the end of September, but after a news story about the program, readers have donated books and money to purchase them. The program runs for about three hours Saturday and Sunday at Santa Rita Jail. Volunteers staff a table with books; each child who wants one can pick a book to keep. Volunteers also read to the children if they would like. The hope is kids will improve their reading skills, become more interested in reading and learn more about library services and programs. Read about the program at The Tri-Valley Herald.

National Family Literacy Day is officially celebrated on November 1, but many events are held throughout the month of November. It’s always important to spread the word in your community and build awareness for the importance of families working together toward a better educated tomorrow. For a new free parent-friendly magazine called Cultivating Readers: Making Reading Active and Fun visit the National Center for Family Literacy.

Surrounded by stacks of picture books with such titles as When Dad’s at Sea, Tell Me One Thing, Dad and Daddy is a Doodlebug, participants earlier this week in the Dads and Early Literacy Workshop in Slayton, Minnesota, were left with no doubt as to the day’s focus. “If parents—especially fathers—read to their preschool children, it really shows and makes a positive difference when those kids arrive at school,” said Tom Fitzpatrick, the workshop’s leader and a program director of the Minnesota Humanities Center, based in St. Paul.

Fitzpatrick offered a few startling statistics to the group of Early Childhood Family Education directors, probation officers and Head Start workers. “One study shows that fully 40% of dads never read to their kids,” Fitzpatrick said. “Only 25% of fathers living in the same home with their children ages 0 to 4 read to them daily.” However, the payoff when fathers do make the time to read with their kids is enormous. Read the article in The Daily Globe.

India’s President Pratibha Devisingh Patil said women’s literacy and education should be treated as a “priority,” at the International Literacy Day Celebration in the capital on Septermber 8. “India is home to the world’s largest number of illiterates and this is a matter of great concern. India accounts for 20% of the world’s out–of–school children and 35% of adult illiterates. When such a large number of the population remains outside the pale of literacy and education, it makes the task of development more complex and daunting. She added that “Women’s literacy and education has to be made a priority. If we make women literate, they will be self–reliant and the beneficial impact on society will be manifold.” Read the article at Gulfnews.com.

Family literacy programs around the country have found their bottom lines snipped this year, leaving a vast competition for other funding. According to the U.S. Department of Education, funding for parent/child literacy programs—called Even Start—were at about $225 million in 2005, at $99 million in 2006 and about $82 million in 2007. For 2008, President Bush has recommended eliminating funding for Even Start. The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee has also recommended cutting funding, though that has not gone before the full Senate. Read more of this article, and see how the funding cuts are affecting local reading programs, in this article from The News-Gazette of east central Illinois.

In his novel Fahrenheit 451, author Ray Bradbury claims that 451 degrees is the temperature at which book-paper catches fire and burns. Those at the DeKalb Public Library in Illinois are about to put his theory to the test. To kick off October’s Big Read initiative—being held to increase literacy and reading—the library will host a book bonfire. The motivation behind the event is this year’s Big Read book, Fahrenheit 451, a novel about a future in which books are illegal in the United States. Read more about this event, and the Big Read, in this article from the Daily Chronicle.

It may look like kindergarten students spend a lot of time playing, but rest assured, they are learning. And yes, you are allowed to volunteer in your child’s classroom. These and other scenarios are among the topics that may puzzle parents new to Canadian schools, so advocacy group People for Education has created a “starting school” tip sheet for them. The sheet—available in 12 languages—is one of a growing number of initiatives helping families be better prepared for school in a new country. Read more about the initiative at TheStar.com.

It’s being called an unprecedented initiative in solving Buffalo’s dire reading problem. The vision of Read to Succeed Buffalo is 100 percent literacy for the city’s children and adults. The campaign, to be launched early next month, is viewed as the city’s first strategic literacy plan. Behind it is a literacy coalition made up of more than 40 local organizations. Read more about the coalition’s goals in this article from The Buffalo News.

Thousands of community events will be held Nov. 1 to mark National Family Literacy Day. But this year, families won’t even have to leave the comfort of their own home to celebrate the importance of reading. The National Center for Family Literacy will unveil Raising a Reader, which provides activities for parents to support their child’s literacy, language and reading skills. This free magazine will be especially helpful to low-income families, whose children hear 30 million fewer words by age 3 than their counterparts who live in households led by professionals. Read more about the magazine’s launch in this article from Newswise.com. Learn more about National Family Literacy Day from the National Center for Family Literacy.

In an earlier life, Xin Meng chased stories as a reporter for a Chinese-language newspaper in New York. Now he spends his days figuring out how to translate mysterious phrases like “empowerment school” and “English language learner” into Chinese. Read more about Meng and other linguists employed by the New York City Department of Education in this article from The New York Times.

The Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy has announced its 2008
national grant competition. The foundation’s grantmaking program seeks to develop or expand projects that are designed to support the development of literacy skills for adult primary care givers and their children. A total of approximately $650,000 will be awarded; no grant request should exceed $65,000.

Principal James Lujan’s secret to success started small, with eight parents who wanted to learn English. Word got around among the Spanish speakers at Eugene Field Elementary School that the principal was the best English teacher in the South Valley neighborhood. Refusing to take money for the lessons, Lujan told the grateful parents they could repay his efforts by spending an hour a night with their children on homeweork. Now, Eugene Field is among 11 district schools that made adequate yearly progress last year after two years of failing to reach the federally mandated goals for student achievement. Read more of this article from The Albuquerque Tribune.

Winterthur Museum & Country Estate, located outside of Wilmington, Delaware, is hosting several events relating to literacy in the coming months. “K is for Kids,” a family-friendly exhibition that explores intriguing objects in the Winterthur collection and studies early methods of reading education, opens on September 15. In addition, “K is for Kids: A Family Day,” will take place from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on September 29, while “Family Literacy Day” takes place on October 12. For more information, visit Winterthur’s family programs website.

José Perez is a fidgety 5-year-old—as if there’s any other kind. Since he’s more fidgety than most, his teacher changes activities often to accommodate his attention span and keep him focused on the business of kindergarten—phonics, reading, writing. Yesterday, his mother, Sylvia, was at his left elbow for 40 minutes, coaching him to put space between words, erasing mistakes, helping him with vocabulary in Escápate, the Spanish-language book the class is reading. José hasn’t learned to speak English yet. Harborside Elementary School in Chula Vista, California, lured his mother onto campus by enrolling her as a student at the kindergarten through sixth-grade school. Read more about this family literacy program in this article from The San Diego Union-Tribune.

The National Institute on Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) recently collaborated on a child and adolescent development project involving roundtables of knowledgeable researchers and teacher educators. They found that researchers in child/adolescent development lack mechanisms for disseminating new research findings and information to sources readily available to teachers, administrators, and other school personnel. Consequently, application of the research and knowledge base about child and adolescent development is a missing element in many teacher preparation programs. Read the full report at NCATE's website.

“Americans, particularly young people, face so many competing demands for their attention that keep them from discovering good books,” said first lady Laura Bush, who visited The Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut to participate in The Big Read, a nationwide initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts. “But it’s important for all Americans to read our country’s literary classics because these works define us as a nation.” Read more of this article from the Hartford Courant.

The National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) is seeking five school districts to receive an award of $600,000 to implement the highly successful Toyota Family Literacy Program (TFLP). The opportunity builds on Toyota’s commitment to this successful program, which currently serves 45 elementary schools in 15 cities nationwide.

The Big Read, a new program of the Louisville Free Public Library in Kentucky, encourages all residents to read—and discuss—the same book. The title chosen is Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the launch date is February 1, to coincide with the beginning of Black History Month. During that time, some 5,000 copies of the Hurston novel, set in Florida in the 1930s, will be distributed to high school students. Some 900 copies, in print or audio format, will be available in the library and its branches. For more information, visit the library’s Web site, www.lfpl.org, or read the article at The Courier-Journal website.

Children in India whose mothers are uneducated are more likely to drop out of school, according to the Annual State of Education Report 2006, released January 5 by Deputy Chairperson of Planning Commission Montek Singh Aluwalia. The survey of more than 300,000 households covering 90% of the districts in the country found the dropout rate of children of uneducated mothers was about 10% compared with 2.5% of their educated counterparts. With regard to the relationship between a child’s learning ability and the mother’s education, the study found that 25% of children of unschooled mothers were unable to recognize alphabets compared with 12.8% of schooled mothers. Read the article about the report at The Hindustan Times website.

A newspaper column offers some good tips for parents to help foster literacy skills.

For many students, the summer months mean going overnight from all-day learning to all-day leisure. Here are ways to combat summer learning loss for reading and other areas too. But homework critics think teachers assigning homework over the summer is a bad idea.

If parents help them, kids are more likely to keep reading independently after age 8 and into adolescence, according to a new survey.

A Florida elementary school program shows parents how to keep kids reading over the summer.

A Utah early literacy program called Motheread/Fatheread aims to help both students and their parents by building parenting and critical thinking skills while increasing reading levels.

At one South Carolina school, families are welcome to the library during a program called Family Reading Time.

Parents think electronic media — used judiciously — are helping their children under the age of six to learn vital skills: This is the conclusion of a research study conducted by Sheffield University. Find details at BBC News (UK).

Almost half of Australian parents don’t read to their children on a daily basis, and two-thirds say they lack the time to read to them as much as they’d like. The figures, described as “disturbing” by children’s author and literacy expert Mem Fox, are included in a Newspoll survey commissioned by the not-for-profit Dymocks Literacy Foundation. Find out more in The Australian.