Observing and Interacting With Families of the Children in Your Setting Observing and Interacting With Families of the Children in Your Setting

As I observed a Pre-k classroom I also had the opportunity to interact with a parent which I had known for 2 years. I have known this parent for two years now because I had her son in my Pre-k classroom. I then started to share a bit of information about what I was advocating for, "ESL/Literacy" and mentioned to her some ideas that I had that would help these students progress in class and help them in their overall success in life. One idea that I shared with her was that I would start planning team meetings with my colleagues to come up with activities using various types of literature to help children in their classroom understand what they are being presented with. Another point that I stressed to her was the importance of making our lending library more appealing and having more bilingual books available with easy to read text. As I mentioned this to her she started to smile and told me that she has noticed that our library doesn't have much that really interests children or parents either because they are filled with more words than pictures and some words in English and Spanish are hard to read . I then mentioned to her that I would bring this up with my director and see if we could order books with more pictures in them and  simple easy to read text. This will interest both parents and children to take books home. I will also come up with ideas of how I can make our library more known to each of our children and their families!!!

Observing and Interacting With Program Director(s) and Other Administrative Staff in Your Setting

• During the last few weeks I have been interacting with our school social working and I have presented to her the importance of Advocating for Early Literacy in ESL.  As i explained and shared my plan in advocating for literacy we came to a realization that in our center we don't do enough for ELL and their families.She mentioned that all we really do is "Literacy Night" and that pretty much it. So our social worker has suggested that we look into this more and see what we could do to help staff and families in our center be more involved in literacy involvement with their children. I then shared with her that since I have been researching the importance of literacy in ESL I came upon with some important tips for teachers who work with ESL children and the information stated that  teachers should focus in reading the same book or familiar versions of the book for a whole week, this will help children understand the stories more and grasp new vocabulary words, this idea helps every child in the classroom as well as ESL students. The social worker suggested that teachers should use props and dramatize stories so that children can better understand and learn to use new vocabulary that they have acquired from the stories that are read  weekly. I must say that I have started doing this with my class and have observed children who don't know much English pick up new words and are more engaged in stories. I believe that this can help any child understand stories and learn new vocabulary! Another important thing that I have observed in my class is that since we have been doing dramatization, it has helped my special needs students in many ways as well in expressing themselves more and learning to sequence stories. 
• I will continue to do more research in literacy and use some important findings with my own students and  observe them and see if it is working for them, in the mean time I will also find more information on how we could involve the school and families in our school to be more aware of the importance of "Literacy".