Family Literacy
Families can play an important role in the Scientific Literacy Project. The SLP home activities are structured to support the home–school connection by helping parents understand how practices in schools promote their children’s learning and what they can do to encourage learning. These activities are designed to build on children’s cultural and family experiences and their existing knowledge at school.
The SLP home component is coordinated with the classroom activities. It involves weekly shared science book-reading activities between parents and children.
When teachers and children begin the classroom SLP activities, parents are invited to support their children’s continued science and language learning at home. Parents learn about dialogic reading with their children through an in-person presentation that includes videotaped examples of reading strategies and a Parent Reading Strategies Guide they keep (see download below). Dialogic reading strategies involve parents (or other adults) engaging children, as they read together, in meaningful conversations that extend beyond the text that is read. Using different conversational strategies and prompts, which call for different types of reasoning, parents ask questions and guide children to think about, and beyond, the text.
Throughout the six units, children bring home a literacy packet that includes the non-fiction books that they have read in class. Each book has a companion Parent Book-reading Guide to aid parents in further exploring the science topics with their children. These guides are designed to help parents extend their children’s vocabulary, comprehension, thinking skills, and mathematical reasoning. The guides also present examples of dialogic reading strategies that can be used with each specific book. They facilitate parents’ use of the reading strategies while reading with their children, so they can scaffold their own children’s learning.
For example, the guides encourage parents to use the language of science with their children to help them understand and use new content words introduced in the books. The parent book-reading guides also emphasize action words and phrases that promote discussion and extend ideas from the books into the children’s own experiences at home and in school. Parents can use activities and discuss topics included in the guides to encourage their children to make comparisons, to ask questions, to generate explanations, to evaluate information, and to talk about their observations of things in the world around them.
Screenshots of Family Literacy Materials
Sample Family Literacy Packet
Sample of Parent Book Guide