Week 10 Reading Blog

Technician - How do I crack this code?
- Given very young children’s development of language and abstraction, how do contextual, multimodal symbols and conventions support their encoding or decoding of the world around them?

Week 10 Reading Blog

What?

This week I was interested in finding out how teacher’s can best support literacy and numeracy learning across multiple contexts and encourage parental involvement. Before I could answer this question I wanted to find out how parents increase literacy and numeracy outcomes for their child. The two readings selected to help me answer this question were, ‘Parental Involvement in children’s acquisition of Reading’ (Darling & Westberg, 2004) and ‘It’s in the bag: Parental involvement in a numeracy at-home program’ (Muir, 2012).

So What?

Parents can greatly enhance the acquisition of both literacy and numeracy skills by encouraging and modelling good literacy and numeracy habits, recognising and responding to their child’s individual needs and abilities, and engaging in joint construction of knowledge during shared reading and numeracy activities (Darling & Westberg, 2004; Muir, 2012). The development of basic literacy knowledge in relation to reading was defined by Darling & Westberg (2004) as knowledge of ‘letter names and sounds, phoneme awareness, early decoding abilities, word recognition and reading comprehension’ (p.774), to be able to guide the development of these skills parents need to have knowledge of strategies to help children learn how to read and decode text. Strategies can include:

- phonic awareness and cues
- use of memory tools (e.g. flashcards, pictures and words (symbols))
- reading in an appropriate learning environment or space
- sounding out letter and word sounds
- guidance, encouragement and celebrating success
- discussing the book before reading it (e.g. awareness of title and pictures)
- encouraging the child to self-correct and not jumping in on mistakes, giving the child time to recognise and correct themselves
(Darling & Westberg, 2004)

Another factor that can enhance or limit literacy and numeracy learning in the home environment includes parental attitudes to literacy and numeracy learning and pedagogy. This includes parent’s early experiences with learning mathematics or reading, negative or positive and societies views toward numeracy as more negative compared with literacy often because numeracy is attributed to just number skills, and general rote learning, rather than the integrated nature of literacy and numeracy that involves daily experiences and concrete problems (Muir, 2012). Parents were able to assist with numeracy development by valuing numeracy activities as just as beneficial as literacy activities (such as reading) and applying numeracy concepts to games and daily concrete experiences (for example cooking) (Muir, 2012).

Now What?

Educators can help parents become more involved in their child’s literacy and numeracy learning by engaging parents in continuous communication and correspondence, giving parents strategies and information on how to support literacy and numeracy development and designing specific learning tasks to engage both parent and child in literacy and numeracy concepts that are easily understandable and provides parents with outcomes that are easily observable (Darling & Westberg, 2004; Muir, 2012).

For me, this reading helped me recognise that learning is very context dependent, and that for successful learning and ‘decoding’ to occur a strong emphasis needs to be placed on connecting learning environments and our role as educators in providing parents with information, especially when they do not have the initial knowledge on how to best assist their child’s literacy and numeracy development. Muir (2012) provided an example of a worksheet that educators could send home to make numeracy homework more enjoyable and engaging for parents, children and families, this example has helped me conceptualise what kind of activities and information I could be providing and how I can respectfully engage parents in literacy and numeracy learning.

 

 (In Muir, 2012, p.29)

 

 References:

Muir, T. (2012) It’s in the bag: Parental involvement in a numeracy at-home program. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 37(2), 27-33.

Darling, S. & Westberg, L. (2004) Parental Involvement in children’s acquisition of Reading. The Reading Teacher, 57(8), 774-776.