Celebrating National Family Literacy Day: Powerful Habits Families Can Start this Week

4-5 Minute Read 

Every November 1, libraries, schools, and community programs across the country mark National Family Literacy Day. The National Center for Families Learning (NCFL) worked with Congress to establish the day in 1994, and NCFL now carries the celebration through the whole month of November. The day rests on a simple premise: children grow as readers and writers when the people around them read, talk, and learn with them.

For us as educators, the day is a natural opening to strengthen the partnership between school and home and a great topic for conferences that often happen at this time of year. Families bring stories, languages, and daily routines that already nurture their children's literacy, and a few research-backed habits can make the most of them. Family also covers a lot of ground and a grandmother who handles after-school pickup, an aunt who hosts on weekends, and a seventh grader who walks a younger cousin home can each play a real part in a child's literacy life.

Below are three habits worth sharing with every family in your classroom community. Each takes little time or money, and each is backed by research you can point to when you share it.

1. Read together, and let the child do some of the talking

Reading together is the habit most families already know, and one small shift makes it stronger. Instead of reading a book straight through, the adult pauses to ask open-ended questions, builds on what the child says, and gradually hands the storytelling over. Researchers call this approach dialogic reading. Whitehurst and colleagues (1988) developed it with families of preschoolers, and a later meta-analysis of 16 studies involving 626 parent-child pairs found that it produced vocabulary gains beyond those from typical read-alouds, with the largest effects for 2- and 3-year-olds and smaller effects for 4- and 5-year-olds (Mol et al., 2008). Those early language gains matter later on. In a five-year longitudinal study, children's early exposure to storybooks at home predicted their vocabulary, and vocabulary in turn predicted their reading comprehension in third grade (Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002).

To imagine this in action, picture a grandfather reading with his kindergarten granddaughter. He stops on a page and asks what she thinks the fox is planning. She says, "He's sneaky," and he answers, "He is sneaky. He's tiptoeing so the hens won't hear him." By the end of the book she has done half the talking and heard tiptoeing used in a sentence she will remember. A parent reading a chapter book with a second grader can do the same thing by stopping at the end of a chapter to ask what the character might do next. 

Dialogic reading follows a four-step cycle, sometimes called PEER, that families can use on almost every page after the first read-through of a book (Whitehurst) This printable chart can be given directly to families to support this work.:

1. Prompt. Ask your child to say something about the page. "What's happening here?" works with any book, and "What do you think she'll do next?" suits older readers and chapter books.

2. Evaluate. Listen to the answer and notice what your child already understands. If something is missing or mixed up, gently fill it in.

3. Expand. Repeat what your child said and add a word or a detail. "Yes, the dog is hiding. He's hiding under the porch because the thunder scares him."

4. Repeat. Return to the first question so your child can answer again using the new words. "So where is the dog hiding, and why?"

Mix these exchanges in with plain reading so the story keeps moving, and follow the child's interest.

2. Turn everyday moments into back-and-forth conversation

Some of the most valuable literacy work at home happens without a book in sight. In a study of 4- to 6-year-olds, researchers recorded children's home language and found that the number of conversational turns between children and adults was associated with children's verbal skills and with activity in language regions of the brain, even after accounting for family income (Romeo et al., 2018). Back-and-forth exchanges, with the child as a full partner, showed the strongest link.

Mealtimes are a natural place for these exchanges. Drawing on recorded mealtimes in families of preschoolers, Snow and Beals (2006) describe how dinner-table conversations full of stories, explanations, and less common words are linked to children's vocabulary and early literacy in kindergarten. A grandmother making dinner with her kindergartner can talk him through each step of the recipe and ask him to tell the story of his day while the rice cooks.

Conversation keeps paying off as children grow, and explanation becomes especially useful. In a longitudinal study of 48 families in the Boston area, the share of mothers' talk spent explaining how things work when children were 9 predicted their comprehension of science texts in sixth grade, even after accounting for earlier language skills and maternal education (Tenenbaum et al., 2005). A dad on a long drive can ask his fifth grader to explain, step by step, how a favorite video game works, then ask why one strategy beats another. An aunt picking up her nephew from third grade might ask what he learned in science and how he would explain it to his little cousin. Families who speak a language other than English at home can have every one of these conversations in the language they know best.

Conversation starters that invite more than a one-word answer:

• Tell me about something that surprised you today.

• How did you figure that out?

• How would you explain that to someone who has never seen it?

• Why do you think that happened?

• What would you have done if you were in your friend's shoes?

3. Keep books within reach, and let children choose them

Easy access to books, along with a say in which ones to read, can make a measurable difference. In a three-year experiment in 17 elementary schools serving mostly low-income families, 852 students chose 12 free books at a school book fair each spring to take home for the summer. By the end of the study, they scored modestly but significantly higher on the state reading assessment than peers who received no books, with a somewhat larger effect for children from the lowest-income households (Allington et al., 2010). A broader meta-analysis of 41 summer reading programs for students in kindergarten through grade 8 points in the same direction: children in home-based programs built around their own book reading made significant gains on several reading measures compared with control groups (Kim & Quinn, 2013).

At home, this can be as simple as a basket of library books by the couch or a stack in the back seat of the car. A middle schooler can walk his younger sister to the library on Saturday and help her find books about the sharks she has talked about all week. An uncle might keep some comic books that he enjoyed as a child on hand to share with nieces and nephews when they visit. Graphic novels, joke books, cookbooks, and comics all count, and a child who rereads the same book or series five times is still reading.

Simple ways to start this week:

• Get a library card for every child in the house, and for the adult(s), too!

• Keep a small basket of books where children already spend time.

• Let children choose at least some of what they read.

Sharing these habits with families

These habits don’t require expensive materials, a free hour, or a parent with a teaching background. They work for whoever is with the child: a mom after dinner, a grandfather at pickup, an aunt on the weekend, or even a close family friend caring for the children after school. Teachers, this National Family Literacy Day, consider sending one habit home each week in November, along with a few of the prompts above in the languages your families speak. Then invite families to tell you what they tried.

For more ideas to share, visit our Supports for Families resource page. Families and caregivers can also listen to Advancing Literacy Beyond the Classroom, our podcast for supporting literacy at home.