Family involvement is a factor in a student's success in school. A child's love for learning can be fostered at a young age, starting in the comfort of one's own home. Below I have created a list of some of my favorite family engagement activities that require parents to be actively involved in their child's learning.
Family Game Night: Build a Letter Game
- Synopsis: Build a Letter is the perfect literacy activity to practice letter naming and recognition. Families will come together to play a hands on game on identifying and creating letters.
- Materials: A tray, odds and ends from around the house or art supply stash, playdough, alphabet letter cards (can be made), nine colored fish or other shape, and timer.
- Directions:
- Game Set-Up
- Collect various items around the house and place them in a large tray (i.e. pipe cleaners, buttons, pom pom ball, and craft sticks). Everyone will be using this try.
- Supply a tennis ball amount of playdough to each player.
- Place the set of alphabet cards (uppercase, lowercase, or both) face down and 9 colored shapes on the table.
- Game Play
- The oldest player goes first. He or she will be the judge for the round. He or she will turn over the first letter card and name the letter.
- The remaining players will quickly build the most creative version of the letter using the playdough and supplies from the tray. For a challenge, players can decide to time each round.
- After an allotted time, the judge picks the letter he/she thinks is the most creative and gives the winner of the round a colored shape (i.e. fish).
- Play continues clockwise until a player has earned three colored shapes.
- Game Set-Up
Grocery Store Literacy
- Synopsis: Need to take your child with you during a grocery trip? Use this time to capitalize on teaching literacy to your child. While going through the aisles of the grocery store, you can ask your child to read labels, have your child be in charge of checking items off the grocery list, have your child compare and contrast items, say and name interesting food items (i.e. asparagus, kiwi, etc), etc.… This is the perfect time to address print awareness skills, writing skills, and even vocabulary skills all in one trip!
- Directions: While going through the aisles talk to your child about print, read labels, say interesting names, compare and contrast, and even have your child man the grocery list. The grocery store is a great environment to work on print awareness and literacy skills with your child.
Reading Corner
- Synopsis: Establishing a reading corner in one’s home is a great way to encourage reading. Children can see their parents reading and want to do the same. This is a perfect way to encourage children to read books: first by being read to, next by reading to someone, and lastly being able to independently read on their own. This is a great way to address all literacy skills – print awareness, concept of print, narrative skills, letter naming and recognition, narrative skills, and many more. The link below will talk about the reading corner and many other reading at home activities.
- Directions: Find a small corner in your living or family room. Put pillows and blankets in the corner along with a library of children’s books. Encourage your child to read over in the corner by reading your own books over in the corner. Also read with your child, have him or her pick a book, look at the pictures, and tell the story in his or her own words. All in all, make sure you give your child lots of encouragement to read to you and independently.
Family Journals
- Synopsis: Have you ever wondered what your child did during the school day but they would never talk about it at home? Family journals are a great way for parents and teachers to partner up to encourage writing skills at home and at school. Students will write about what is happening in their classroom and what they are learning. They will then take the journals home to share with their parents.
- Materials: Notebook (journal) and pen/pencil
- Directions: At school students will write in their journals about their school day and bring the journal home to share with their parents. Students will share the journal with their parents and then the parents will write back, commenting on what their child wrote, asking questions, and positive praise. The goal is to encourage your children to work on their writing skills.
Family Literacy Portfolio
- Synopsis: Children bring work home from school pertaining to assessments and activities they did. Often times, teachers cannot guarantee that parents are seeing these and the progress their child is making during literacy instruction. This idea is to encourage parents to collect artifacts and create literacy portfolios to share with teachers. All literacy skills will be addressed through the portfolios.
- Directions: Children are encouraged to share all their work with their parents. Parents are to collect samples of their children’s reading, writing, and schoolwork assignments and create a portfolio. Some items included in the portfolio can be drawings, notes, stories, handmade cards, crafts, lists of read books, and photocopies of favorite books. There should also be a section of observation notes so parents can effectively communicate with teachers about their child’s literacy at home. During parent-teacher conferences, parents are taking an active role in talking about their child’s literacy development with teachers.
READO
- Synopsis: Children love to play bingo and READO is a fun twist to the game. READO is a bingo board filled with squares that encourage children to do literacy skills and reading at home by actively involving their parents. This is a great long-term reading project that is actively involving parents and providing children with a sense of accomplishment. Students are actively working on all literacy skills (i.e reading skills, narrative skills, writing skills, comprehension skills, etc).
- Directions: READO is formatted onto a bingo card and has tasks for children to complete at home with their parents (i.e. “listen to mom or dad read a story”). Children are to pick a square each day and complete the activity listed in it. Majority of the time parents will be involved in the activity the child has to do that day. After the student completes the task, their parents must sign off saying they did the activity.