Family Literacy Night is an exciting way to engage students and their parents in meaningful literacy activities while building community spirit and strengthening the partnership between school and home. It is an opportunity for students to show their parents what they do in school; how they create in the computer lab, how they work in the art…

This study examines a family literacy intervention conducted in two first-grade classrooms with culturally diverse student populations. In the treatment and control classrooms, six parents and a classroom teacher learned practices for building home-school partnerships. Data were analyzed to determine changes in home-literacy practices, increases…

Latino families highly value education and are committed to their children's educational success; however, Latino students often experience educational challenges. Well-designed family involvement programs can encourage Latino families, especially new immigrants or monolingual Spanish-speakers, to increase their involvement resulting in positive…

The National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) presents, alongside the Goodling Institute for Research in Family Literacy at Penn State University, these proceedings from the research strand at the 22nd National Conference on Family Literacy. Through these sessions, NCFL's conference continues to provide the latest research in family education…

This article reviews the relationship between poverty and reading achievement in America's schools. It then discusses how to advance the reading proficiencies of students from economically impoverished homes. It gives particular emphasis to school-home partnerships and sociocultural literacy practices.

The purpose of this study was to examine Hispanic families' perspectives on using a prepared kit to enhance their preschoolers' vocabulary development at home. Families enrolled in a public prekindergarten program were provided with a bilingual (English/Spanish) home literacy kit that included ways in which to engage their children in activities…

Background/Context: Educational reform has emphasized the importance of parent involvement. Perhaps the most common instantiations of parent involvement are various efforts to encourage particular reading practices in the home. Although there is some research supporting the efficacy of "family literacy" initiatives, these efforts have been…

This article reports on a family literacy program that began with the creation and implementation of a Welcome Center in an elementary school in the Southwest United States. This center was intended to be a place where recent immigrant students and their families, teachers, as well as other community members, came together to participate in…

The aim of this qualitative study was to examine how Latino immigrant families incorporate school-based interactive literacy activities into their existing home literacy practices. Findings revealed that Hispanic parents appropriate school-related literacy activities into their existing repertoire when they believed it would best help their…

Family literacy has come of age during the past quarter of a century. This article provides a brief review of family literacy history and components. Pedagogical implications for teachers of primary grade students are considered, and suggestions given for increasing home-school literacy involvement through the following types of initiatives:…

In this work, prominent authorities review the latest research on all aspects of ELL instruction (K-12) and identify what works for today's students and schools. Provided are best-practice guidelines for targeting reading, writing, oral language, vocabulary, content-domain literacies, and other core skill areas; assessing culturally and…

Describes a program where each family shares a story in its native language and the children then provide an English translation when the original was a language other than English. Concludes with the hope that through fostering relationships with students and their families, all can benefit from the merging of the school and home cultures. (SG)

A collaborative approach to program evaluation combined with the use of a variety of evaluation methods using currently available technology can yield valuable information about the effectiveness of family literacy programs. Such an approach was used for McCosh Even Start, a federally-funded family literacy program located at McCosh School in an…

New perspectives on childhood learning are beginning to change the way we view the development of early literacy, which is progressively conceptualized as embedded in social practice. The recognition of the powerful influence of out-of-school learning prompts questions about ways of linking home and school practices. This article reports a…

Notes that the purpose of the project was to collect evidence about learning in the "life school" of families. Describes the second session in which people brought in artifacts to tell family stories about learning in their homes. Finds that families and teachers involved in this project become more aware of home experiences as part of literacy…