October 2, 2010
University of New Hampshire, Portsmouth, NH
Content Area Reading and Writing

October 8, 2010
NEA-NH Instructional Conference, Bow High School, Bow, NH
Involving Parents in Their Children’s Reading Development

October 23, 2010
University of New Hampshire, Manchester, NH
Guided Reading and Running Records

November 20, 2010
University of New Hampshire, Manchester, NH
Phonemic Awareness and Phonics

Please feel free to make contact through “Author Contact” for further information. Enjoy!

Summer is here. Share the reading excitement throughout the summer months. Encourage parents to continue with the daily read aloud. This will go a long, long way towards improving reading skills. Here are some other suggestions to share with parents.

1. Trade books with friends. Encourage parents to organize an event to which each child brings at least one book to trade. Children take home as many books as they bring. To make this successful, be sure to have a few extra upper level books on hand. Children tend to trade lower level books for the upper level books.

2. Reading challenges. Encourage parents to take their children to the local library. Most libraries offer some sort of summer reading challenge. Sign up and take part.

3. Charity drives. Encourage friends, relatives, and neighbors to sponsor children to read books. People might donate one dollar per book read, or 10 cents for every page read. Donate the proceeds to a local charity.

4. Reading reviews. Ask permission to hang a bulletin board where children will see it, such as the library, maybe a local store. Let the children display their reading suggestions.

5. Book clubs. Encourage children to start or join a summer book club. Share the fun.

Most of all, summer reading should be fun, something children look forward to. When parents take part, and when parents help their children to find the time to read, children tend to look forward to it, and then comes the fun. Whatever you can do, as the teacher, to help parents here will help children practice and grow further. These children will be better ready for school when school begins in the new year.

Talking to children before heading to bed might be more effective in helping them learn language than reading to them. According to an article in the recent Reading Today magazine, citing researchers from UCLA School of Public Health, basic conversation could be up to six times more effective than reading. Even if a baby or toddler cannot form words, primitive responses to a conversation may help develop language skills. What to do with this? Encourage parents to both read and talk with their children often.

Interested in helping your parents learn to read to their children? Not all parents know how to present a read aloud as effectively as teachers do, so you may need to show them. Present a Milk and Cookies Night. This is a night where you invite your children to school, with their parents, and maybe with pajamas, sleeping bags, pillows, stuffed animals, and whatever else might make them feel as comfortable as at home. Choose a classroom setting where there are lots of books or try to use the school library.

Choose some of your favorite books to read. Model good read aloud techniques such as showing pictures, reading with excitement, or asking interactive questions. Read two or three books, maybe taking about 20 to 30 minutes. Offer the milk and cookies as a middle of the night break. Then invite parents to choose some books, find a corner in the classroom to read to their children. Again, two or three books, maybe taking about 20 to 30 minutes. For the most success, walk around the room, interact with children and parents, and if necessary, tactfully help parents to read correctly. Most of all, make sure all participants have fun.

A special thank you to Amy Hartman, Reading Specialist/Kindergarten Teacher, from North Carolina, for this wonderful idea. I’ve followed through two times with great success.

What a wonderful surprise I found today in my mailbox at school! A $3,000 check from Target!!!

Hi, my name is Betsy and I’m a fourth grade teacher in Orlando, and the self-appointed grant-writer for our school. This summer, I challenged myself to see how many grants I could earn for our school. Last fall, I had earned a $1,000 field trip grant from Target and I realized I had been bitten by the ‘grant-bug.’ I worked for many hours on a ‘Learn & Serve’ grant this spring, and was excited when our school was awarded $5,200 for the environmental proposal I had submitted. So, as the summer months passed, I started searching the web for any grants for which our school might qualify. I was amazed to find so many available. My quest had begun.

Our grant from Target is totally based on the We Both Read series. We are a Title 1 school, with 80% of our students on free/reduced meal programs, and we are 70% Hispanic. Our students are not reaching the required goals for math, reading, science, or writing state assessments. We have a population of 970 students, pre-k to grade 5, and sadly, have less than 20 families who attend PTO meetings. We know parent involvement is the key to the success of our students. We just didn’t know how to encourage the involvement. Then, I found We Both Read.

Our grant will allow us to buy 10 complete sets of the We Both Read series, plus many accessories, and provide our student/parent partners with incentive prizes as students are successful with their leveled books.

We will be holding monthly mini-workshops with 1/2 hour parenting sessions for ‘tips to help’ and 1/2 hour Celebration sessions with a light snack provided by our Partners-In-Education sponsors.

Fran, from Customer Service, was so excited to hear about our grant. She asked me to submit a post here to encourage other teachers to find the means to reach the parents.

The Target Grants are the most-friendly grants out there. They are calendar related, but it’s never too early to start thinking of a proposal. In the meantime, you can look for other literacy grants. There is a lot of money out there for Early Readers, which is the section of the Target Foundation which honored our grant.

The most important thing to remember is that you’ll never know if you can be awarded a grant until you try. (Don’t be surprised if you, too, aren’t bitten by the grant-bug once you are awarded your first one.)

Betsy

Here is a flyer you can send home to parents on reading together with their child. Reading together (or taking turns reading) is a great way for parents to support beginning readers and struggling readers! Click the following link to open the flyer (in PDF format) to print or save to your computer.

parent-flyer-on-reading-together