Home Responsibility for Educating Children (continued)

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Producing a Literacy Atmosphere

Babies are immersed in language from birth and begin to develop communication skills during the earliest months of life. Their skills expand rapidly because of planned and unplanned family interactions and experiences (Sparling, 2004). Parents echo their infant’s vocalizations, name things, and direct the baby’s attention to the objects, people, and events around them. Parents, other family members, and caregivers often explain to the baby what they and the baby are doing, demonstrating with real objects accompanied by language. Families often introduce babies to books during their first year: Talking about the pictures, turning the pages, and sharing the pleasure of snuggling together with a book will become the foundation for later reading development. Writing emerges in much the same way. Toddlers, given paper and crayons, will scribble, draw, and make lists in imitation of their parents’ writing. All young children find it necessary to communicate with different adults and with their peers, and this develops language, which is the base for literacy.

Later literacy development in the home includes listening to, discussing, and making up stories; practicing reading and writing; and modeling more elaborate speech (Beaty, 2006; Jacobs, K., 2004). Research with children involved in a family literacy project (Paratore, 2001) indicates that “children who have parents who read to them, help with homework, monitor their performance in school by asking questions of them or their teacher, and who urged them to be on time and to behave courteously achieved success in school.”