On February 10th, the project began with the introduction letter and pre-survey sent home to parents. The survey contained questions regarding the parent/guardian's personal reading habits, the child's reading habits, and how parents/guardians read with their children. As expected, not many surveys were returned. Out of a grade level or 58 students, 11 surveys were returned. Surprisingly on average parents said that they read often, and that they read with their child very often. They also cited that most children choose to spend their free time reading books. The lowest statistical answer was to the statement, "I am knowledgeable of other reading strategies for unknown words." This is one of the areas that I decided to target.
Starting on February 24th, activities for parents to do with their children were sent home weekly. The activities were pulled from the Florida Center for Reading Research's website. They have many activities meant to be done in centered focused on specific tasks. Following my research that showed phonemic awareness to be one of the primary skills necessary to learn in kindergarten, I choose mostly phoneme segmentation and blending activities.
I had two parents send in time logs after the first week, one the second week, and three the last week. However, there were more surveys sent in for the before and after, so I do know that some parents just forgot to send in their logs.
The first activity was a phoneme sort. Students were to look at the picture card, name it, "tap out" the sounds and count how many sounds they heard. Then they placed the card in the appropriate pile based on the number of sounds the word had.
The second activity was a phoneme hopscotch. It was very similar to the first activity but instead of sorting the cards, the student would "hop" the number of sounds the word had.
The third activity was a chip slide. Students would name the picture, and then slide up chips or any other kind of manipulative as they said each sound.
The post survey elicited twelve responses, one more than had been returned for the pre-survey. This showed me that while not all parents were responding to my requests to send in certain materials, the activities were still being used which I appreciated. I got a lot of positive feedback from the post surveys which I appreciated. It was definitely an eye opening experience not only to the activities I learned about, but into how parental involvement works.