Creating a Home/School Connection with Hispanics

For all kinds of valid reasons, creating a home/school connection with Hispanics may seem challenging at first, but once the process begins, it’s often not half as difficult as first thought. Let’s look at how schools can build a great connection with Hispanics.

The answer could lie in a storybook. Family literacy studies indicate that parental storybook reading is beneficial in helping kids to develop literacy. Experts say that schools should take the lead by providing the proper tools to help Hispanic parents to do this.

For many Latino parents, however, this is often challenging. Some of their reasons may include:

• not having much confidence in reading or reading aloud.
• having limited literacy ability, themselves.
• a lack of English proficiency, overall.

The University of Nebraska found that children whose parents read books to them in their home language made improvements in literacy that were similar to a native English language group who were read to in English. Because both languages are being supported, these are terrific findings. Regarding the child’s home language, educators also state that it’s okay, as Spanish is being acquired, for parents to move into advanced levels, as this will provide even more enriching language experiences for the child.

Regarding the study, itself, researchers developed a bilingual family literacy program that provided reading techniques to Latino families in an afterschool program. However, only because they had a time limitation, otherwise they believe it would have also been highly beneficial had at-home reading tools been provided.

In a journal article, researchers Delgado and Gaitan say that more proactive measures need to be taken to prevent social and academic crises among Hispanics. It’s also imperative, they state, for schools to design parental involvement activities at different levels. NCBI, a branch of the US National Library of Medicine adds to this saying that school interventions for Hispanic youth must become a national priority.

Finding educational programs that support ELL students’ first language, such as The Latino Family Literacy Project, can make an enormous difference on their academic and language acquisition success.