Improving Primary Literacy

Linking Home and School

Anthony Feiler, Jane Andrews, Pamela Greenhough, Martin Hughes, David Johnson, Mary Scanlan, Wan Ching Yee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134226061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Parents can play an immensely important role in supporting their children's literacy learning at home, but how can primary teachers enlist the support of parents in helping children learn literacy?

With a focus on improving children's literacy skills, this book provides practical answers to key questions that are directly relevant to all primary teachers and to many parents. It presents new ways of linking learning in home and school through a range of activities that can be used to share knowledge between children, parents and teachers. Activities include:

• teachers and children making videos to show parents how children learn literacy in school
• parents and children taking photos of the 'everyday' literacy they use outside school
• parents and teachers exchanging information through Home-School folders and diaries.

Particular attention is given to ways of working with parents from a diverse range of family backgrounds reflecting the multi-ethnic nature of many schools today.

The practical activities can easily be fitted into the day-to-day activities of busy classrooms and can provide crucial new ways of improving children's learning of literacy skills.

Chapter 1
Why link home and school learning?

This book is about the different ways in which children learn about literacy at home and at school. It is also about how these different ways of literacy learning can be brought more closely together, for the benefit of teachers, parents and children. The early chapters provide detailed accounts of home and school literacy learning as experienced by a small group of children. The later chapters provide practical examples of activities designed to bring home and school literacy learning more closely together, through a process of home–school knowledge exchange. We hope that readers of the book will gain new insights into the nature of literacy learning, and come to understand why home–school knowledge exchange is so important. We also hope that readers will try out some of the knowledge exchange activities for themselves, and invent new ones which are tailored to their own particular circumstances.

Two key ideas about children’s learning

This book – and its companion volume Improving Primary Mathematics: Linking Home and School– are based on two fundamental ideas about children’s learning and how it can be enhanced.

The first key idea is that children live and learn in two different worlds – home and school. Clearly, this is an idea that no one would seriously take issue with. Yet it is also one whose importance has never been fully accepted. When educators and politicians talk, as they frequently do, about the need to improve levels of children’s literacy, they are usually advocating changes to the way children are taught literacy in school. This kind of literacy learning is of course very important: there is no doubt that much of what children come to know about reading, writing, and the nature of language takes place through their literacy lessons in school. But school is not the only place where literacy learning goes on. As we shall see in Chapter 2, children are also learning about literacy through their ongoing daily activities at home and in the wider community, as they interact with parents, grandparents, siblings and friends, as they play games, write messages and stories, or watch cartoons on TV. This kind of learning is often hidden from public view, but it is of vital importance in understanding how children come to be literate.

One consequence of children living and learning in two different worlds is that the two kinds of learning may become separated. Children may be unable or unwilling to draw on what they have learned in one world when they are in the other. The knowledge, skills and understandings they have acquired at school may not be accessible to them at home, and vice versa. Moreover, key adults who might be able to help children make the necessary connections between the two kinds of learning may not have sufficient knowledge to do so. Teachers may not know enough about what their children are learning at home, while parents may not know enough about what their children are learning at school.

In the area of literacy, this kind of separation seems to be particularly acute at the moment. In the UK, the teaching of school literacy has been transformed by the National Literacy Strategy. The literacy curriculum, the shape, content and pace of literacy lessons, the way that literacy is assessed – even the use of the term ‘literacy’ itself – are all very different from how many of today’s parents were taught. As a result, parents may not feel sufficiently confident to help their children at home, or worry that they might be confusing their children if they try to do so. Similarly, the nature of many children’s out-of-school lives may be relatively opaque to their teachers, particularly when the children come from a different ethnic or religious community to that of the teacher. In addition, the increasing prominence of popular culture in children’s lives, and the role it has in shaping their ideas about literacy, may be something that their teachers are not fully aware of.

This brings us to our second key idea – that children’s learning will be enhanced if home and school learning are brought more closely together. Again, this appears to be an idea that few would take serious issue with. Teachers have long been encouraged to draw on children’s out-of-school interests in their teaching, and to keep parents involved with and informed about their children’s learning in school. Parents have long been encouraged to support their children’s school learning at home. And, indeed, there have been several influential research projects – some going back to the 1970s – which have demonstrated the value of parents and teachers working together to support children’s learning, particularly in the area of literacy.

As with our first key idea, though, the importance of this second idea has never been fully accepted. Teachers and headteachers often tell us that the pressures they are currently under to ‘raise standards’ means that developing effective home–school partnerships is, for many of them, an area of relatively low priority. We would reply that the most effective way to raise standards is to bring together children’s home and school learning. These are not two competing priorities: rather, one is the means to the other.

At the same time, we recognise that many teachers and headteachers are unclear about what methods they might use to link home and school learning. Unlike other areas of the curriculum, there is little clear guidance for teachers on what approaches and activities would most effectively bring this about. Nor are there many suggestions as to how to deal with some of the obstacles which might arise. This book and its companion volume Improving Primary Mathematics: Linking Home and School are intended to provide much needed guidance in this area.

The nature of this book

The book arises directly from a major innovative research project – the Home School Knowledge Exchange Project – which we carried out between 2001 and 2005. During this time we worked closely with teachers, parents and children from different communities in the two cities of Bristol and Cardiff, developing, implementing and evaluating a range of home–school knowledge exchange activities. We also carried out in-depth interviews with many of these teachers, parents and children, and asked parents and children to make videotapes of their home learning.

One strand of the project focused on home and school literacy learning for children in Years 1 and 2, and the book draws heavily on the work of that strand. At the same time, it is not intended to be a full account of the research and its findings (see the Appendix for more details of the project). Rather, it is an attempt to make project outcomes available in a usable form to all those interested in children’s literacy learning – at all ages – and how it might be enhanced through home–school knowledge exchange. This includes:

• teachers

• headteachers

• literacy coordinators

• family learning coordinators

• teaching assistants

• students in initial training

• teachers on postgraduate courses

• teacher educators and other educationalists

• school governors

• parents and parents’ organisations.

In order to make the contents of the book accessible to such a wide range of audiences we have deliberately emphasised practical action and the issues arising, and kept references to academic texts to a minimum. Readers are encouraged to try out and adapt the activities described here, and are free to photocopy and use the various sheets included in the text.

Chapter 2
Literacy at home

In this chapter, we look at some literacy events taking place in the homes of five children aged between five and seven years – Geraint, Seren, Luke, Poppy and Parveen. Through the exploration of these events, we will seek to establish some of the features and characteristics of what literacy can look like at home.

Events with literacy goals

Messaging

Geraint lives in a small terraced house with his mum, his dad who is a manual worker, his older sister, two younger siblings and a new baby brother. Geraint has a problem. He has recently been allowed to have a television in his bedroom but today he has been naughty and he has been told he can’t watch it. It is coming up to 8 o’clock and he knows that his favourite ‘soap’, Holby City, is about to start. He loves watching the doctors doing the operations and the way the tensions are played out – will the patient live or die? When he got home from school, he checked the TV listings to make sure it was the right day. He is certain that it’s on tonight. He thinks about going downstairs and saying he is sorry for being naughty but he knows this will get him into more trouble. The baby is asleep in his pram in the living room and Geraint knows that opening the squeaky door and pleading for a reprieve will annoy his parents, especially if the baby wakes up. He decides on a strategy that he often uses. He gets a scrap of paper and writes a note.

dear dad I’m sorry and please

can I have the TV on

circle yes or circle no

Geraint

as retold by Geraint’s parents

yes no

Quietly, he creeps down the stairs and slides the note under the door. While he is waiting for a reply, Geraint goes into the kitchen and writes out his menu card for the following morning. Today, he writes:

I’ll have plain toast and cereal.

Sometimes it’s scrambled egg, but whatever he chooses, it will be different from what is written on his sister’s menu card. His dad wi...

Table of contents

• TLRP Improving Practice Series
• Contents
• Series preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Why link home and school learning?
• Chapter 2 Literacy at home
• Chapter 3 Literacy at school
• Chapter 4 Literacy activities that take school to home
• Chapter 5 Literacy activities that bring home into school
• Chapter 6 Home–school knowledge exchange – benefits and challenges
• Appendix: The Home School Knowledge Exchange Project
• References
• Index