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After reading the School Improvement Plan and taking into consideration the NC School Report Card, I decided to focus on Priority Goal 1: Increase literacy proficiency for all students by increasing students' independent reading practice using authentic text. Being that I am placed in a Kindergarten class, I knew that I could control the literacy work that went on in the classroom, but parent involvement was out of my control. Many parents of kindergarten students want to help their children read, but are not always sure how to help them. I wanted to give them an additional tool to help their child that they can use at home.
Kinder-Phonics
After much consideration and research, I decided on a parent involvement project that will increase literacy practice at home. The research that I found suggested that phonemic awareness contributes greatly to children's acquisition of the alphabetic principal (Manyak 2008). I decided I would create a take-home activity program that involved parents the centered around phonemic awareness.
To know if the project would help, I needed to know how parents felt about reading with their children at the beginning of the project. I decided to send a before and after survey to see what parents learned, and how much they knew about reading with their children. This would also help me tailor the project for them. I planned to send home the survey, and then follow the survey with three weeks of activities for families to use at home. These activities also will go home with a time log to track the use of the activities. At the end of the project a second survey will go home to track it's effectiveness and also allow parents to give comments on the activities.
Time Line
Research Base & Data
At the kindergarten age, parental involvement is crucial to language development. However, one of the most common questions from parents of kindergarten students is, "What can I do with my children to help them learn to read?" (Imperato, 2009). Most parents need some help beyond simply reading aloud to their children. Phonemic awareness is easily the most important part of learning to read for kindergarten students. Phonemic awareness refers to a sensitivity to any size unit of sound. It's the ability to generate and recognize rhyming words, to generate and recognize rhyming words, to count syllables, to separate the beginning of ta word from its ending (Yopp & Yopp, 2000). Not only is being able to recognize phonemes important, but being able to blend the phonemes contributes to success in beginning reading and spelling (Manyak 2008). Once I realized the area that I wanted to focus on, I needed a way to get parents involved.
In one study to introducing reading activities for parents to do with their children, a researcher found that students who participated in the program showed increased reading levels as measured by assessments. In January, a few months after the program began, 40 out of 86 (66%) students were non-readers. At the end of the year, 17 out of 86 (19%) were non readers (Imperato, 2009). This reading specialist has continued the program at the school to increase reading proficiency in kindergarten. This study shows how important parental involvement is in beginning reading.
References
Imperato, F. (2009). Getting parents and children off to a strong start in reading. The Reading Teacher, 63(4), 342-344. doi: 10.1598/RT.63.4.12
Manyak, P. (2008). Phonemes in use: multiple activities for a critical process. The Reading Teacher, 61(8), 659-662. doi: 10.1598/RT.61.8.8
Yopp, H., & Yopp, R. (2000). Supporting phonemic awareness development in the classroom. The Reading Teacher, 54(2), 130-143.
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