Pelletier – kindergarten literacy study

I’ve been involved in three major studies with parents. The first one is a study that brought parents into kindergarten a number of years ago. So parents came into kindergarten with their child once a week for twelve weeks, and this had actually fallen on the heels of a preschool parent involvement study so they were combined in that way. So parents attended school with their child for twelve weeks and they participated    in the circle time with the teacher and the children. So they sat behind the kids just as if they were part of the classroom. Then—the teacher was explicitly modeling how to read to children. Or the teacher would look up and speak to parents and say: “the reason I asked the question in that way is because…” 

So parents were picking up some of the key questioning and responding to children: strategies that teachers use. Then the parents participated with their children at free play, or at activity time—whatever the teachers called it. Sometimes teachers would give parents an observational activity like “go look at the children in the sand and see what they’re learning. What do you think they’re learning by their playing in the sand?” Or they might follow their own child around and just observe how their own child is learning or how their own child interacts with other children. 

But sometimes teachers would have parents actually interact with a group of children. They’d give them a little job to do. So the parents would learn how to question children themselves in a group—that kind of thing. And at the end of the morning or the afternoon, the parents would then participate in a parent-only workshop. And this workshop was developed by me and/or my graduate students, and it was typically on a topic that parents were interested in. So often it was early mathematical understanding, especially literacy—they were most interested in that. Sometimes it had to do with behaviour regulation. Sometimes they wanted to know about children’s drawings or art, what they could do at home. 

So we, if one of us, wasn’t set up to give the workshop, then we would bring in people from the community who would provide these fantastic workshops for parents. So at the end of the twelve weeks, parents had really had quite a good session, in you know, what it’s like to be in a kindergarten class, how they can extend learning at home, and many, many of the parents in that study spoke English as a second or third language and so they themselves were learning English at that time.