Sandau How-tos

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Instructional Materials & How-Tos

Your primary students are learning, but not fast enough to keep up with the quickly accelerating benchmarks of early literacy assessments. You want to call in the troops for help. What are the steps to building partnerships with families and community organizations to enhance your students' learning outside the classroom? Read below to see the steps I followed in my project, and to find samples to help you along your path.

1. Identify your target students

I used the "Letter Naming Fluency" assessment from DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) to identify students who needed help. This fall-administered, district required test captures how many correct letters a student can name on a page of randomly ordered upper and lowercase letters in one minute. The lowest performing students on this assessment became target students for my first group, the parent intervention group.
Target students were then given the DIBELS "Nonsense Word Fluency, Correct Letter Sounds" assessment as a pretest. This assessment tests the student's ability to blend letters into words using their most commonly used sounds. Student who remained in the lowest performing group on this assessment were selected as target students for the subsequent groups I worked with: the after school program group, and the siblings group.
These assessments quickly measure students' fluency with letter and sound recognition, and put students into levels of need for support. Students who score low enough to require "intensive need for support" are deemed at high risk for struggling in reading later. Research shows that letter sound knowledge is among the strongest predictors of later literacy success, even when other variables are accounted for (Lonigan & Shanahan, 2009). See my Assessment Page for more information on the assessments I used in my programs.

LESSONS

REFERENCES

ASSESSMENT

2. Develop your activities (with your potential partners in mind)

Based on the need for growth in letter and sound recognition, I developed activities to address these skills. Be sure to to examine where the target skills fall within your content standards. See my Standards page for more details on how the standards were addressed in my project.

Keep your potential partners in mind as you develop activities. Activities for parents to do with kindergartners can be more complex than activities you would design for sibling pairs. See my Lessons page for all the activities I paired with the different partners in my project.

3. Develop a schedule for your program

How long would you like your program to last? Consider your district's assessment calendar. You might want to use fall or winter assessments as pretests, and plan your program to last long enough to make an impact on the next administration of assessments or progress monitoring.
My action research cycles were only 4-5 weeks each, and many parents reported on the survey that they wished the program had been longer.
Use a calendar to plan out when and how you will distribute activity materials and collect them. Will you distribute new materials on Fridays so that students have time to work on the activities over the weekend? Or would your teachers prefer that materials go home in their homework envelopes on Mondays? If working with community partners, plan to be flexible and to work with the schedule of the organization and staff.

4. Choose and invite your partners

Think outside the box. Obvious choices for partners include parents, older students, and after school programs. But think about all the people who might have an interest in helping your students and the community. Don't be afraid to reach out with crazy ideas. You never know what might happen!

Below are some brainstorms I did to explore a few of the possibilities:

Whenever possible, a personal phone call is the best place to start. Family members might have questions like, "Why was my student selected for this program?" You will be able to personally reassure them that you are doing all you can to utilize every opportunity for students to succeed. Community partners are more likely to understand what you are trying to accomplish if you can speak with them about your ideas.

Here are some sample invitations to give you some ideas:

Click image for Parent Invite PDF in English and Spanish

Click image for Super Siblings Flyer PDF in English and Spanish

5. Present your program to partners

Follow this basic outline for presenting your program:

Introduction: Describe who you are and what your role is at the school or organization.
Why you should work together: Outline the importance and benefits of students improving early literacy skills
What you want them to do: Outline the details of the program including a demonstration of the activities, plan for communication, and any incentives.

See my Lessons Page for detailed descriptions and samples of the presentations I gave for each type of partner: parents, community organization, and siblings group.

6. Communicate often

When working with community organizations, be sure to check in frequently in person, by phone, or by email with program staff. This will let them know how important the program is, and give them a chance to problem solve with you when needed.
When working with families, I used our district's home-school communication app, ParentSquare, to send home weekly reminders and digital resources for the program. Family members with smart phones could access these messages and resources to stay in the loop. Be sure to use an app that will translate to students' home languages. See my References Page for more communication apps.
Each of my research cycles included activity logs so that I could monitor the frequency or duration that partners and students were spending doing the activities.
For the parent and sibling programs, I offered online logs in addition to paper logs. The logs were part of the digital weekly message I sent out on ParentSquare.

Here are some samples of the weekly digital messages and activity logs in English and Spanish for the parent group:

Click image for Sample ParentSquare messages to parent groups PDF in English and Spanish

Click image for PDF of Parent Log in English and Spanish

Here are some samples of the weekly digital messages and activity logs in English and Spanish for the siblings group:

Click image for Sample ParentSquare message for Super Siblings PDF in English and Spanish

Click image for PDF of Sibling Log in English and Spanish

7. Assess

Post assess your students, using the same test you used at the start of your program. See my Assessment Page for more information on the assessments I used in my programs.
How did your students do? If your results weren't what you expected, what might have been some of contributing factors? Now is the time to critically evaluate all the parts of your program to see where improvements can be made.
Get feedback from your participants. Try to ask as many open ended questions as possible. Your objective is to learn as much as you can about their perspectives so that you can make it easier for them to experience intended benefits.

See below for samples of surveys I used to get feedback from all three of my programs:

Click image for PDF of the Parent Program Survey in English and Spanish

Click image for PDF of After School Program Staff Questionnaire

Click image for PDF of Siblings Program Surveys

References

Lonigan, C. J., & Shanahan, T. (2009). Developing early literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel. Executive summary. A Scientific synthesis of early literacy development and implications for intervention. National Institute for Literacy.