Migrant and Head Start Literacy
The staff at the Su Casa center, a delegate agency of the Illinois Migrant Head Start Project, considered factors that affected the availability of printed materials for farm workers. Angie Gomez, Su Casa Family Services Coordinator, pointed out the unlikelihood of migrant families adding books to the necessities they are able to carry as they travel to job sites, and the language barriers they encounter when they try to use public services, like libraries, in "upstream" communities.
The issues voiced at Su Casa prompted the Illinois grantee administration to apply for Head Start funding for family literacy. The money was used to furnish lending libraries at centers and to operate a literacy program. Selected for replication was the bilingual, inter-generational literacy model designed by Elizabeth
Quintero, Ed.D., and Maria Cristina Velarde, M.Ed., of El Paso Community College in Texas. The program is an extension of the bilingual whole-language approach used in Head Start classrooms. At weekly classes, parents and children engage in hands-on projects like cooking or painting. They use the written language of their choice to complete a language experience activity related to the project. The bilingual instructor also demonstrates reading a story to the children, and each family chooses a book to borrow for the week.
The grantee also used a one-time Head Start grant to buy 200 books for each of their sites. Selections in Spanish and English accommodate every age and reading level, including sturdy board books for babies. Especially helpful to parents with low reading skills are wordless picture books, which enable parents to tell the story as they show the pictures to their children. All books are consistent with the program's anti-bias philosophy, and several include migrant farm worker themes.
Head Start staff who worked in the program emphasized the link between parents' reading aloud to their children and the children's eventual mastery of reading. Former grantee director Gina Ruther stated, "There's a universal desire for the kids not to repeat their parents' past, but to have choices in life. They know the biggest factor in having those choices is success in school." Migrant Head Start hopes the literacy program will contribute to the realization of this goal.
For information on this program, contact: the Department of Children and Family Services, 406 East Monroe Street, Springfield, IL 62701-1498.
Home Visitors and Family Literacy
Annie Coleman, Education Assistant, Richmond Public Schools, Richmond, Virginia
Home visitors are in a position to impact family literacy in major ways by encouraging the "literacy" skills of children and their families.
Some approaches of home visitors in the Richmond Public Schools are to:
Of major importance is that staff review the Family Needs Assessment at the beginning of the program year to assess the literacy needs of each family.
- Arrange family field trips to the library to obtain library cards and borrow books;
- Schedule parent visits to Head Start centers to borrow toys, books, and games;
- Show parents how to model the development of reading skills by pointing out street signs with their children, and reading grocery lists and food labels in the grocery store;
- Assist parents in gaining skills with "telling" as well as reading stories to their children.
- Set up training sessions on job applications, interviews, and resume preparation; and
- Facilitate transportation for parents to training centers in the schools so they can earn their GED's.