Parents Make the Difference PD Initiative
Parent education was selected as the focus of the spring 2008 TFLRC Initiative based on results of the Texas Even Start Professional Development Needs Assessment. Three Three-day sessions were offered in Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas. In addition, DAY THREE was offered in San Antonio.
Materials from the Parents Make the Difference Inititiave has been collected for family literacy staff to use as online professional development. Please read through the descriptions below for each day, and then use the buttons at the bottom of the page to link to educational materials.
DAY ONE: The initial theme was parenting information that would support the “Parents as First Teachers” tenet of Even Start and provide a framework for positive everyday interactions that support the language development, social development and literacy development of very young children. A curriculum entitled You Make The Difference, published by the Hanen Centre, was identified as providing such a framework.
DAY TWO: A second theme that was clearly connected with the first was promoting simple, inexpensive but powerful activities for parent-child interactions that supported language, social and literacy development throughout early childhood and that could be easily used by parents at home and during the Even Start ILA component. The Learninggames® curriculum, an outgrowth of the ground-breaking Abecedarian Project research, provides such activities.
DAY THREE: The third theme that emerged was the importance of recent research on dialogic reading, a strategy that promotes language development that can be used by virtually any parent or caregiver. Dialogic reading is essentially “book sharing” and research has consistently demonstrated that some simple steps in book sharing can accelerate language development particularly for children ages 18 months to three years. Because children love to talk about themselves and things they have done, TFLRC staff decided to include aculminating activity that would incorporate photos and language about themselves by showing participants how to develop Personal Pictures Books at their sites. Participants then can teach parents how to develop these books for their own children.
Day One Day Two Day Three
