Highters Heath Nursery

Project Coordinator: Sue Andrew (HT)

PL method: Parent tutored language and emergent reading

Objectives:

• Improve quantity and quality of pupil receptive and expressive language
• Improve quantity and quality of pupil emergent reading skills
• Improve socio-emotional quality of communication and interactions between parent and child
• Particularly young single disadvantaged parents.

Target Groups:

Within small 2-class nursery, children belong to one of 4 groups. Total parents = 52. All parents potentially to be involved, but not all immediately in the interests of quality of service delivery. Advise parents cannot handle all at one time. Names for initial target group to be "drawn out of a hat". Need to ensure initial Phase 1 project group = min 12 parents, from across all 4 groups, to ensure critical mass/momentum and mutual support. Therefore need to invite 16-ish, assuming not all will take up. Parents of children with Special Educational Needs such as autistic spectrum disorders and speech and language difficulties to be included.

Contact:

Specify minimum commitment for parents: 3 times weekly for 15 minutes for 6 weeks. If more frequently, and for longer, excellent, but this is minimum involvement. If parents at all doubtful if their participation is possible, encourage them to defer participation to later project.

Staff Inset Day:

Completed. All staff participated.

Training for parent tutors:

One-hour launch meeting with children present to be conducted by school. This to be scheduled for 2 weeks before half term, as second half of term is only 4 weeks. Parents and children to be present. Include practice element with own child at launch meeting - need to pre-choose book for this. Consider parents with more than one child - how to offer attention to all, how attend launch meeting?

Phase 1 target parents to be approached informally verbally as they bring their children into the nursery. Written invitation with reply slip request to follow. Informal face-to-face verbal reminder day before meeting at least. Possibility of energising children to urge their parents to attend in Phase 2. Ditto for wider local publicity.

See Suggestions for Parents created at the in-service day below. This serves as a policy document for all staff, to be abbreviated to form the input content at the launch meeting for parents and children, and to be abbreviated further into a reminder leaflet for parents to take home.

Format to include:

• Welcome and Introduction re Purposes
• How To Do It talk (as per script below)
• Demonstration: two staff: Reading To then With + Talk BDA
• Practice (children to pre-choose books for efficiency; private spaces for parents of restricted literacy) Questions
• Talk on Access to Books, Home-School Diary, other Follow-up
• Verbal Agreement (or not) to participate
• Take away reminder leaflet

Determine to whom Diary returned, and what day and time. Consider colour coding diaries per week.

Timescale:

Second half of term only 4 weeks, so need to launch 2 weeks before half term, giving 4 weeks activity after half term and before Easter break. Consider review meeting for phase 1 parents immediately before or after Easter break, which might be related to a launch meeting for any phase 2 parents who have expressed interest. Phase 1 parents could input personal testimony to phase 2 launch meeting.

Resources:

Children currently take home a book weekly. School book stocks high and plentiful. Destruction/loss rate low. Children to be able to take 2 books for project if desired. Child selection to be guided by parents and nursery staff. All books in school available to take home. These chosen at weekly library sessions. Parents to be encouraged to attend weekly choosing sessions and encounter further modelling/advice re high quality interaction with child & book from nursery staff. This might then enable the capture of some video of real/local positive parent-child interaction which would be valuable for onward training/launch purposes. Consider need for additional Story Sacks, audio-tapes, audio players from external sources. Link to nearby community library to be explored - ? library staff to visit nursery to talk to parents.

Home-school language /reading diaries to be created - sample hard copy and electronic file left with school, together with hard copy and electronic files of other relevant resources.

Evaluation:

• Countables re implementation process: attendance at meetings, books read, home-school-diary returns, etc.
• Post-project parental subjective feedback re (1) child's language/reading/self-confidence etc. and (2) parent's self-confidence and knowledge of books. Sample parent questionnaire left with school in hard copy and as electronic file.
• Teacher observations of child gains in language/reading skills within the nursery Possibly compared to matched non-participant children. Internal Nursery Profile already completed termly. If done at the end of Term 1, end of Term 2, end of Term 3, pre-post and follow-up data are available for children participating in Phase 1 and Phase 2, and comparable with non-participants. Also Birmingham Profile complete at start of academic year and in June, in Language, Literacy and Social development. A somewhat similar analysis on these data for triangulation could also be carried out.
• Possibility of direct observation of parents plus a video diary, documenting improvement in parent-child interaction during library choosing sessions (useful for future launch/training).
• Possibility of an interview with a small sub-sample of parents, to explore their thoughts and feelings and comments on interactive behaviours and specific changes in their child in more depth (useful for future launch/training).

The project went very well. Evaluation data collected - to be analysed shortly. The project is already rolling out - story sacks and tapes are being offered to other parents, with a good take up so far. Parents are proving reliable in filling in home-school diaries. The feedback from parents has been positive, and workshops well attended. Watch this space for further evaluation information.

Onward Development

• As above re Phase 2 parents
• Link with Inspire programme and Family Learning re Adult Literacy issues
• Link with visit of Ros Bailey re oral story telling
• Possible cross-school peer tutoring from local (very near) primary school
• Possible PT to extend into reading /language in ICT environment

The nursery then moved on to develop a programme of parental involvement in mathematics. This was also extremely successful. They then moved on to develop a comprehensive programme of parental involvement across the curriculum. The work cascaded up into the neighbouring Junior and Infant school, and across the authority into other nurseries and schools.