Family literacy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Family literacy is a method of education. Relatively new, family literacy is currently beingput into practice in the United States and in South Africa.

[edit] Overview

Comprehensive family literacy services provide a holistic, fully integrated, family-focused approach, providing parents and children most in need of improving their literacy skills with intensive, frequent and long-term educational and non-educational services. Family literacy services make sustainable changes in a family by integrating all of the following activities:

• Adult Education: designed to extend basic academic level, think critically and creatively, solve problems, set and achieve goals, and acquire successful workplace and interpersonal skills.

• Childhood Education: designed to promote the growth and development of young children and to engage parents in their child’s educational program in order to foster meaningful involvement that will be maintained throughout the child’s educational career.

• Parent Education: provides instruction on how children grow, develop, and learn. It addresses issues critical to family well-being, connects parents with community resources, and provides opportunities for parents to network and develop mutual support systems.

• Interactive Parent/Child Activities: provides parents and children the opportunity to share their newly developed literacy experiences. Parents and children interact together, enriching their relationship through reciprocal learning that takes place, enabling them to become true partners in education.

[edit] Philosophy

The roots of family literacy as an educational method come from the belief that “the parent is the child’s first teacher”. Statistics have demonstrated that adults who have a higher level of education tend to not only become productive citizens with enhanced social and economic capacity in society, but their children are more likely to be successful in school. A literate family tends to be stronger family, more likely to remain a wholesome unit. ^{[citation needed]}