Emergency lesson plans for family literacy

April 16, 2015 9:15 AM

It was recently sprung on me that I will be teaching not only my usual group of adult ESL students next week, but also their children. I need some ideas.

The classes will be going for a total of twelve hours over three days. The kids range in age from 9-15. The idea is for us to do family literacy, which can be actual literacy (parents and children reading together) or other life skills. I have some ideas for what to do, but I'd like some more.

What I'm thinking:
> games like taboo, headbanz, charades, pictionary, which encourage communication and creativity
> discussions about multiculturalism, stereotypes
> talking about goals and making goal posters for each child or each family
> talking about strengths, skills, interests
> students and parents reading books together (we have access to a library)

I've taught a lot, but rarely a group with such mixed ages and skill levels. Parents are beginners at English, children are fairly fluent. All are of Puerto Rican background. Ideas for specific activities or for general ideas of topics we might want to discuss would be greatly appreciated. Thanks AskMe!

posted by chaiminda to Education (6 answers total)

The American Library Association has some resources that may be helpful:

Building STEAM with Día Book lists: Intended to accompany El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Día) programming, these book lists are comprised of multicultural titles that showcase STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) topics. Lists are available for children from birth to 8th grade.

2014 Día! Booklist – November 2013 (update): Día is a national initative that works to emphasize the importance of literacy for children of all linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Created by the Quicklists Consulting Committee the 2014 Día Booklist is a collection of over 100 multicultural, bilingual and second language books for children from birth to age 14; and ten different languages are featured in this list. The list also comes with helpful tips to parents and information about Día in English, Spanish and Chinese.

posted by Little Dawn at 9:45 AM on April 16, 2015

What about a cooking lesson? Even if you don't have a 'kitchen', there are lots of no-bake cooking ideas out there. Recipes can be typed out to match the literacy level of the participants, with lots of pictographics clues, as needed. Maybe a class member can suggest Puerto Rican dishes or deliberately chose recipes that might be new and novel to kids and adults. It combines some reading skills, is a great inter-generational project and can be a ton of fun. Best of all, it can be a great 'take home' where people may take the English language materials home and use them again and again. There are lots of 'kids' cook books out there, but it may be more fun to create a class cook book over the few days you have, and then print or copy it for everyone in the group.
posted by Northbysomewhatcrazy at 10:07 AM on April 16, 2015

The U.S. Department of Education also has some resources that may be helpful, including this collection of case studies:

Family Involvement in Children's Education: Successful Local Approaches (June 2001) Note: This is an archived publication. This Idea Book is offered to stimulate thinking and discussion about how schools can overcome barriers to family involvement in their children's education, regardless of family circumstances or student performance. This publication is based on case studies of 20 successful local education programs.

posted by Little Dawn at 10:37 AM on April 16, 2015

Could you do something on situations where the kids end up interacting with parts of English-speaking society on behalf of their parents (e.g. in stores, dealing with authority) because they're the ones with the more proficient language skills? Parents could learn some vocabulary for dealing with those situations, kids could talk about their experiences of communicating/translating for their parents.
posted by terretu at 1:16 PM on April 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

I recommend you download the (free) Get Set Learn guide, "Everything You Need to Run a Family Literacy Program." It includes lesson plans. It would not open for me in preview on FireFox, but I was able to download it and open it with Adobe Reader.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 1:43 PM on April 16, 2015

I want to second cooking or some sort of craft project - I did soup/muffin in a jar. Looks pretty, is edible, adjustable, and everyone can get in on the action.

It was with young kids but I also did a DIY book. We took photos, printed them out, pasted them into a book and wrote stuff in them. It was a huge hit with parents particularly.
posted by geek anachronism at 5:46 PM on April 16, 2015