Interviewing Professionals in Early Childhood!!!

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing a Site director and Social Worker from a pre-school in which I currently work in. I started off my interview by interviewing them at the same time and asked them if they also believed that Literacy is a current problems associated with early literacy in our school? They both agreed that the current issues that are related towards literacy is the lack of understanding the importance or reading to children at a young age. Both site director and social worker mentioned that they feel that although they have lending libraries in our school only about a few families do check out books. Talking to other colleagues in our school they have also seen the lack of interest that parents have in literacy, although our school has done many literacy workshops they still feel uninterested in it. The site director mentioned to me that although she sees a great success in Literacy night, where each teacher in their classroom picks a particular book to read and give copies of the same book to parents and children they seem motivated in reading to their children and doing the activities that go along with the book, but afterwards the interest of checking books out or reading to their child in their class has always been unsuccessful. The social worker gave her opinion and mentioned that maybe the problem was that parents worked to much and had no time to read to their child, and a good way to interest them in literacy was for teachers to invite them to write with their child, read and do other activities that promotes literacy. I agreed with the social worker but also brought a big point to both site director and social worker, I mentioned to them if they knew of any families in our program that they felt were illiterate? They both glared at each other and said that they never paid any attention to this matter.

I mentioned to them that I  personally have experienced a parent in my classroom that doesn't know how to read because of a past experience in home visit were she had to fill out a form and couldn't and instead asked me to read it to her and fill out. I felt bad that I almost felt guilty of not knowing  but I asked myself, how could I have known that she didn't know how to read.

I urged both Site Director & Social Worker along with my colleagues that we should help these parents that don't know how to read by having workshops that can help them so that they can help their children be successful in school. Children who are brought in up in an environment where there is no interest in literacy may not be interested in it by the time they approach  grammar school.

Although literacy doesn't start with viewing books but by listening, children often will struggle with school if they are having difficulties putting words together, then he or she may have difficulties in Math, Science and social concepts.

Our goals for our school and to motivate children and their parents in literacy would be to have intervention programs, where families can attend to realize why literacy is important and the affects of reading early on. I came up with some ideas that can motivate parents such as engaging in reading programs throughout the year and hosting annual book fairs!

Based on this interview I really gained a lot of information about our families in our program and I hope that by guiding them and emphasizing the importance of literacy will get them to see the importance of literacy verses not having literacy at all.