May 18, 2012

Dr. Judith Kronin

Creating Parent Centers

The buzz phrase in education is “preparing students to graduate college ready and career ready.”   November 3, 2011, Newsday reported New York State Education Commissioner, John B. King as stating “my most pressing task is to help students graduate college and be career ready.”  On February 2, 2012 at Hofstra University’s “Distinguished Lecture Series, Commissioner John B. King referred to this task as an “economic imperative.” President Obama’s Commencement Challenge, “Race to the Top”  “fosters critical thinking and innovative use of knowledge to prepare students for college and career, helping America win the future by out-educating our competitors and achieving the goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020.”   On July 18, 2011 President Obama said “providing a high quality education for all children is critical to America’s economic future. Our nation’s economic competiveness and path to the American dream depends on providing every child with an education that will enable them to succeed in a global society that is predicated on knowledge and innovation.” The first question is, what age does this preparation begin? The second question is, how should we proceed? The preparation starts the day parents/guardians bring their children home from the hospital /birthing place. Many parents will need the additional resource of a Parent Center.

What is a Parent Center?

A Parent Center is any supportive environment where parents can meet to gain insight about strategies, resources and skills that their children need to compete in 21^st century schools. 

Why is There a Need for Parent Centers?

Parents must be armed with the resources that are needed to assist their children to be prepared to learn basic and social skills when they start school. Most children start school by entering Kindergarten. Kindergarten is not what it used to be. Prior to No Child Left Behind and high stakes testing, Kindergarten was a place where children focused on social skills. Presently, children are expected to enter Kindergarten with a specific set of social and basic skills, and leave mastering social and basic skills that are more advanced. The underlying issue is that many more parents from middle and upper middle class homes are aware and prepared for the new standards while others are not. Many parents from middle and upper middle class homes are aware of the new instructional standards and have taken steps to prepare their children for the new academic requirements. Parents from lower income homes find it harder to acquire basic economic needs for their families, making it harder to prepare their students for the new academic standards. Consequently, children are not entering school on the same level playing field. A larger number of students have to repeat Kindergarten and lower grades and a higher percentage of students are classified. The sad commentary is that some children become discouraged and never catch up with their peers and/or develop negative feelings toward school.  

Parent Centers: Skills and Strategies That Parents Should Master 

Children must be ready to read before they leave Kindergarten. For this to happen, parents must know:

• Phonemic awareness which is the individual sounds of a word; they must recognize the sight and sound of each letter of a word c/a/t. Parents can create games to accomplish this and help each other in a supportive way to understand this concept.
• Phonics – the relationship between letters and sounds through written language. They include our common sounds: an, at, in, et.
• Decoding – the ability to apply one’s knowledge of letter sounds to letter patterns to correctly pronounce written words.
• Fluency – the ability to read aloud expressively and with understanding.
• Vocabulary Development – the ability to expand ones word bank. The best way to develop vocabulary is for the student to learn new words in a meaningful way.
• Reading Comprehension – the set of steps that good readers take to make sense out of the text that they are reading and they include:
  • Making inferences – making a prediction based on something that one has read;
  • Prioritizing information – determining the most important to the least important part of the text;
  • Creating mental images of what one is reading;
  • Repairing understanding encouraging the reader to take their time with their reading as opposed to plowing through the material and
  • Synthesizing information – basically it involves using a combination of the previously mentioned reading skills that have been defined. It combines elements including questioning, making inferences and repairing ones understanding of the text 
• Context Area Literacy – the impact that reading, writing, and listening have upon learning. (Pearson, Roehler, Dole, Duffy 1992)

Parent Centers Can Service the Diverse Needs of Parents in a Community.

Parents can start a Parent Center with the basic understanding of emphasizing the importance of reading to their child every day for 20 min. or more.  They can help other parents grasp the notion that an understanding of early language development is greatly influenced by how much parents read and talk to their children. Parents can assist in inspiring other parents to recognize the specific milestones that are expected at particular ages during the growth and development of children. One example is 2 year olds are expected to be able to point to objects.  Parent Centers can ease the fear and intimidation that some parents have of schools that have resulted from bad personal experiences when they attended school.  Parents can serve as mentors to other parents to relieve stress. This is particularly helpful for parents with limited use of English language or parents of disabled children.

Kindergarten Assessments

Usually at the mid-point of the school year, Kindergarten students are assessed on number of skills.  Some parents are fully aware of these assessments and take measures to prepare their children while other children have not had the benefit of similar exposure.  The assessments can include:

• Digit Naming Rate – this assessment consists of six rows with 5 single digits per row on an 8”X11” card. The students are timed as they name the digits as fast as they can, beginning at the top and counting to the bottom. The student has two opportunities and the score is an average of the two outcomes.
• Yopp Singer Test – This assessment is a test of phoneme segmentation. It consists of 22 items and requires students to separately articulate each phoneme in the words presented. The student only receives credit if all of the sounds in a word are correctly pronounced.
• Bruce Test of Phoneme Deletions – This assessment consists of 30 one - three syllable words drawn from words familiar to children between the ages of 5-61/2. The examiner asks the student to delete one phoneme from the beginning, middle, or end of the word and the child must then say the remaining word. The positions of deleted phonemes are randomly ordered throughout the test. The test is individually administered and requires 10 minutes to administer.
• Auditory Analysis Test – This assessment consists of 40 items arranged in order of difficulty from the deletion of syllables in compound words to the deletion of syllables in multisyllabic words to the deletion of phonemes in beginning, middle, and end positions. The examiner asks the student to delete a syllable or a phoneme and say the word that is left. The measure is administered individually. 
• Rapid letter naming, dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills -It consists of 104 randomly selected upper-and lowercase letters presented on one page. The measure is given individually, and students have 1 minute to name as many letters as possible in the order that they appear on the page. (Chard and Dickson 1999)

Summary of Parent Center

A Parent Center is a supportive environment where parents can meet to gain insights about strategies, resources and skills that children need to compete in 21^st century schools. They can be located in a school, community center, church, college/university or someone’s home. The Parent Center can be organized around the needs of children in grades K – 12, be devoted to one particular grade level, or be designed to meet the multiple needs of a diverse community. Parents can attain guidance and support for staff development from a number of different resources including their school district, local colleges or universities or education foundations. The importance of Parent Centers cannot be underestimated. 

References

Chard, D.J., and Dickson, S.V., (1999)   Phonological Awareness:

Instructional and Assessment Guidelines, Available online 

Retrieved March 29, 2012 from http://www.Idonline.org/article/6254

Hildebrand, J. November 11, 2011, Education Chief Willing To Meet Principals, Newsday, New York

President Obama, (July 18, 2011) Education The Whitehouse, Available online, Retrieved November 7, 2011 from http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education

Pearson, P., David, L.R., Roehler, J.A., Dole and G.G. Duffy, (1992) “Developing Expertise in Reading Comprehension.”  In S. Jay Samuels and Farstrup, A. eds. What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction, 2^nd Edition.  Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

jkronin@verizon.net

www.creatingsmartschools.com