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Authors: Lori Severino, Nancy Scharff
Keywords: early literacy, parent engagement, reading skills, urban education
Abstract: Learning to read is a critical skill for young students to master. And it is widely recognized that parental involvement in literacy instruction, impacts student success. Parental involvement at an early age in a child’s literacy development has been shown to be important for school success (Dearing, Simpkins, Krieder & Weiss, 2006; Leslie & Allen, 1999; and Rush, 1999). Further the National Literacy Trust, in summarizing the research in 2007 states: Research shows that parental involvement in their children’s learning positively affects the child’s performance at school (Fan & Chen, 2001) in both primary and secondary schools (Feinstein & Symons, 1999), leading to higher academic achievement, greater cognitive competence, greater problem-solving skills, greater school enjoyment, better school attendance, and fewer behavioral problems at school (Sylva, Sammons, Chan, Melhuish, Siraj & Taggart, 2013).
Two parent workshops were developed and offered to parents in a large urban area.
The Early Reading Skills workshop supports parent understanding of three key foundational skills defined by the National Reading Panel (2000) - Phonological Awareness, Phonics and Fluency - and provides not only materials for parents to use during the workshop, but the same materials and activities to take home to use with their child.
The Active Reading Workshop, supports parent understanding of the other two National Reading Panel (2000) foundational skills - Vocabulary and Comprehension - and provides books for parents to use during the workshop, as well as books to take home. Both workshops are supported with videos that demonstrate and explain each of the skills.
Pre and post surveys were given to parent attendees of both workshops. A subset of parents were also interviewed.