Offer the Early Reading Together Programme to Families at Your ECE Service
Early Reading Together® meets the need of service providers and teachers for an effective family language and literacy programme to support children and their parents/caregivers.
This is a research-based and well-proven family language and literacy workshop-based programme developed in NZ and used in NZ and internationally.
Why do Centres and Home-based services provide the ERT programme to families?
What’s great about the programme is that it is practical, user friendly, enjoyable, and manageable for teachers, parents and caregivers and their children.
The overall goal of Early Reading Together® is to help children develop a love of language and reading and the range of language and literacy abilities they need to function confidently and effectively within their communities and wider society.
It supports the adults in children’s lives (ECE staff, parents and families) to:
- More fully understand the ways in which talking with young children and reading to them (from the time they are babies) helps the child’s language and literacy development.
- Explore additional ways of supporting children’s language and reading development when they are reading stories and rhymes, and singing songs together.
- Learn more about the type of books, rhymes and songs which are suitable for young children and enjoyable for them.
Workshops
The Workshops are designed to enhance the support which parents/whānau provide for their children’s language and literacy development. It consists of guidance to provide 3 workshops over 3 weeks (each workshop lasts no more than 1 hour and 15 minutes).
Workshop 1: Helping young children with language and reading at home – Getting started
Workshop 2: More ideas and ways of helping young children’s language and reading development (as they get older)
Workshop 3: Sharing ideas, giving feedback and gathering more resources in the community library (where possible)
You may wish to invite or collaborate with junior school teachers or local community librarians when offering the workshops.
Early Reading Together®: Workshop Leader’s Handbook
ERT comes with a handbook. The handbook is a guide and resource for early childhood teachers or leaders to use when implementing the programme with groups of parents.
Rhymes and songs
The set contains six sheets of rhymes and songs. Parents are given two sheets at each workshop and are encouraged to enjoy these with their children at home.
Or you can purchase sets of these sheets (a minimum of 10 sets) for parents or teachers at your early childhood service or playgroup.
Booklet of Suggestions for Parents
This booklet is for parents and contains suggestions for enhancing children’s language and literacy learning at home.
Boz: A ‘reading book’ for adults
This is one of the activities within the workshop programme.
Boz has a special alphabet which has been invented to help adults gain some understanding of what children experience as they are learning to read.
Learn more about Early Reading Together – the resources and programme
