What Can Family Literacy Look Like?

What can we do at home? This list of suggested activities is short, and is designed only as a springboard for your own ideas. Begin with an activity you can do easily and comfortably with your children. Then add those activities that work especially well for you and your children.

from NCTE's Parent's Guide to Literacy for the 21st Century:

• Let your children see you reading for pleasure. Share some vocabulary or great phrases, a character, or even part of the story line with them. See if there are any similarities with books that your children are reading.
  
  
• Talk to your children about how your parents read to you or told you stories.
  
  
• Let your children see you write for pleasure. Send family letters to relatives or friends. Let everyone in the family contribute a part or an illustration.
  
  
• When you're riding in the car, tell your children a story about when you were little, or tell them a story about something that happened at work that day. Leave off the ending and let them provide an ending.
  
  
• Have your children select three things they want included in the story. Make up a story that includes those three things. For example, the selections might be a princess, a race car, and an ice cream cone. The children will love helping you find clever ways to include three things in the story.
  
  
• When you pass a rock formation, landmark, building, or street sign, take turns with the children thinking up a legend behind the name or creation of the item. Even though you might all be familiar with the actual background story, making one up is lots of fun. At night, you might think up legends for the face in the moon. Follow up these storytelling events with a trip to the library to find out legends from other countries or groups.
  
  
• Try different ambiances for your readalouds or storytelling. If it's a scary story, for example, tell it in the dark or read it with flashlights. If it's a story about when one of your children was an infant, bring out an old toy and hold it as you tell the story.
  
  
• Try themes in your family literacy events. This works naturally with holidays, but lots of different themes can be used any time. If your family has chosen popcorn as a theme, look through magazines for pictures of popcorn; make a collage of places where you might eat popcorn; find packaged foods in the grocery store that contain popcorn; list all the different kinds of popcorn available; pop some popcorn, with everyone  helping to read the recipe; trade popcorn stories (when did you first string popcorn, or first eat it in the movie theater) and make a little book of those stories; select books (fiction and nonfiction) that have to do with popcorn and read them aloud.
  
  
• Make a family book that is a collection of stories: favorites retold generation after generation or stories of family events (first visit by the tooth fairy). Any time that stories are recorded, younger children can dictate to an older family member.
  
  
• When you go on a trip, keep a family journal, writing down impressions and events, keeping postcards or illustrations, noting unusual names for places, or recording strange stories from different places.
  
  
• Keep a list on the refrigerator of foods that need to be bought at the grocery store. Have children held add to the list and, when you go shopping, have the children read the list, find the items, read packages for information, and check items off the list.
  
  
• Keep a little note pad or recycled pieces of paper next to the telephone. Use that area as a message center where family members can leave telephone messages or other notes to each other. You can even turn the message center into a little post office with little boxes or pockets for each family  member.
  
  
• Keep a family calendar in a central place, such as the family message center. The best calendars for this are the ones with large boxes for each day so that your children can enter their own special dates or draw pictures as reminders.
  
  
• If you watch the news on television, discuss the news with your children; compare the television or radio news to an article in the newspaper.
  
  
• When you watch a movie, talk about the characters, about how important the setting (time and place) were in the movie, about the sequence of events. Ask how the movie compares with a book and discuss an alternative you or the children might have written for the movie.
  
  
• Discuss television viewing with your children and then have your children use the television guide to make a daily chart of programs they will watch. Read the short summaries of plots and descriptions of programs.
  
  
• Use whatever the children have watched on television to connect to books. Help the children find books that give more information about something that has interested them on television.
  
  
• Members of older generations make wonderful readers for young children, and children also make wonderful readers for older listeners. Children can read their own writing, a favorite story, or magazines and newspapers. Two or more generations can collaborate on a story or book. Using special paper to write on or binding it makes the book even more special.
  
  
• Have a bookmark-making party. Have each family member write his or her name on a piece of paper and list favorite topics or books. Place all the papers in a box and have each member drawn a name and design a bookmark specially for that other family member.