School has started again and the concerns for “summer slide” may be diminishing, but it’s important to keep families reading together each day.
As literacy tutors, teachers and administrators we eat, sleep and breathe reading, and we need to make sure the students and families in our programs are doing the same.
The rule of thumb is to read with your family for 20 minutes daily. It’s a manageable amount of time for most families and it doesn’t have to be done in one sitting! Sometimes it is helpful to break the reading up by book, for younger readers, or by chapter for older children.
Check out this quick benefit breakdown discussing The Power of 20 Minutes a Day if your students need some convincing.
Jennifer Perez, a Tampa-based teacher & tutor, has also generously shared one of her favorite family reading techniques with us – The Family Reading Bug – and has also adapted it for the classroom. Additional family literacy resources can also be found on the FLC website!
Do you or your students have great ways of fitting 20 minutes of reading into every day? If so, tell us about it in the comments section below.
0 comments on “Dedicate 20 Minutes Each Day To Family Literacy”
Susan Perez
August 23, 2010 at 2:23 pmA variation on Jennifer Perez’s theme for classroom use. For early childhood education classes, each day one of the helpers listed is Selector for the Book-of-the-Day. Each day during circle time, one child gets to choose a book that will be read just to that child or to the group. The teacher can allow the child to select from all the books in the class, provide a book from home, or the teacher can have a small selection of books based on theme or skill being taught from which the child may choose. Usually the children know the day before they will be The Selector, so if they want to bring in a book from home that is an option. Many of the families have limited books at home and often times, no adult able to read well enough to read the book with the child and while many have older brothers and sisters who read with them, the siblings reading fluency does not lend itself to an enjoyable reading time. We provide one book to each child in the Head Start program as a gift during December. The teachers report that many of the children will bring in those books to be read.
imtjen
August 28, 2010 at 9:08 amThank You for sharing Susan- a wonderful idea!