Welcoming Families: A Parent Literacy Project in a Linguistically
Rich, High-Poverty School
Diane Barone
Published online: 13 October 2010
Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Abstract This article focuses on a parent literacy project
that included shared reading and how to support this
strategy with families who have a home language other
than English and live in poverty circumstances. Literature
about the importance of shared reading to children’s liter-
acy development is shared in tandem with the importance
of building parent and school collaborations. Details are
provided about the literacy project of working with fami-
lies at Greenbrae Elementary with supporting photographs
and parent comments. Strategies to bring such an approach
to other schools are described with many pragmatic con-
cerns addressed.
Keywords Family literacy Á Shared book reading Á ELLs
Parent–child shared book reading is more likely to
have positive effects on children’s literacy and lan-
guage learning when parents engage children in
multiple readings of a text; when parents encourage
children to respond to text through questioning and
elaborating; and when the texts read include both
narrative and expository genres (Paratore et al. 2010).
While engaging families in shared reading events with
their kindergarten children is laudable, teachers in high-
poverty, linguistically rich schools often find this involve-
ment is difficult to attain. They may complain that families
infrequently visit their child’s school or their families’
homes have few books to sustain shared reading events.
They talk about how hard it is to communicate the impor-
tant parts of shared book reading when they do not speak the
language of the parents. They experience a conundrum—
they value shared book experiences between parents and
children but they are not sure how to pragmatically make
these experiences happen. For instance, how will they
encourage parents to visit their school to see shared reading
in action and how will they get sufficiently, culturally
appropriate books into families’ homes? Further, how will
they accomplish these goals when they do not share the
language of their families?
With these attitudes and questions in mind, I approached
Greenbrae Elementary, a high-poverty, linguistically rich
school, to collaborate with teachers about reading and
writing instruction and learning. I was surprised as I
approached the school as I noticed a group of parents
talking and drinking coffee with the school’s parent facil-
itator; an unusual experience in my working with high-
poverty schools. My experiences at high-poverty schools
were such that parents brought their children to school, but
they infrequently interacted with teachers or the school
staff. I was even more intrigued when the parents followed
the parent facilitator into the building and then to the
kindergarten classroom. I wondered why parents were so
comfortable at this school. How did this happen and what
were they doing in the kindergarten classroom?
This article shares how a school rich in linguistic diversity
engaged in a literacy project with parents so that they were
an essential part of the school community. It documents the
assessment, planning, implementation, and evaluation of the
parent project. Moving beyond this single example, sug-
gestions are offered to develop the project at other schools,
particularly those with rich linguistic diversity.
D. Barone (&)
University of Nevada, Reno, College of Education/299, Reno,
NV 89557, USA
e-mail: barone@unr.edu
123
Early Childhood Educ J (2011) 38:377–384
DOI 10.1007/s10643-010-0424-y