The OneVille Project is working to support people in Somerville kids’ lives to communicate and collaborate about strategies for student success. One of our pilot efforts is to hold academic family events where parents and young people get together to share strategies for improving kids’ learning.
In monthly Reading Nights we’ve held at the Healey School in Somerville, we get parents and kids together who share a Kindergarten hallway (3 different programs) to talk and work together on specific tactics for helping kids read. (We just attended an annual Math Night at the Healey that is a great model of getting kids and families together to enjoy math!) We build community by eating pizza together, learning skills together in some creative way, and then talking, as parents, about how our children are doing with reading. (Planning the Reading Nights has also created a diverse team of parents working together on OneVille and schoolwide efforts.) We invite teachers to share tips with us, and as parents, we share strategies that are and aren’t working in supporting our own kids to read better. Meanwhile, kids do fun reading activities.
We held a Reading Night on May 18, 2010. Children enjoyed a multilingual scavenger hunt for words in the Healey School’s garden (compost/abono/composto; soil/tierra/terra). Everyone then went into the school library to watch a video of a Healey K teacher guiding one of the K kids through reading. Older kids then read books to younger kids, while parents shared ideas about strategies and struggles with young kids’ reading. Parent-to-parent tips included: if the child can’t sound out a word, look at the pictures for clues. Read the pictures before they even start the book. Alternate: let the child read one sentence or page, and you read one sentence or page.
At the April 13th Reading Night, children from a K class performed a book about penguins, driving home the early reading skill of telling stories. Parents watched a video about phonemic awareness and then shared strategies that parents had seen work for kids’ reading.
Parent tips included:
- Play games with the sounds in words (pig! dig! fig!) and spell words you find around in everyday life.
- Tell kids long words they are struggling to read. Break words into syllables.
- Find your child books that he really is interested in.
To end the night, one dad shared a Nigerian folk tale that he was told as a child to help him learn early literacy.