A Pivotal Year for Family Literacy/Kingston Literacy
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Distance Learning		 Over the last few years, there has been widespread recognition of the importance of nurturing literacy skills in children right from day one. The Early Years Study, chaired by Dr. Fraser Mustard, highlighted the fact that if children don't receive the proper stimulation from a very young age, their potential can be seriously undermined. As a result of this very important study, the provincial government has recently set up Ontario Early Years Centres at locations across the province, including one for Kingston and the Islands, and another for Hastings-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington. In co-ordination with the two Ontario Early Years Centres (OEYC) in our region, Kingston Literacy continues to host the Early Years Specialists. We are partners with the OEYCs in offering workshops to parents and providing the Reading and Parents Program (RAPP) at their drop-in-group. We see this partnership as a critical step in beginning to address the challenge of low literacy skills in our community, and in our province.
 
An important step in this process as well will be to address the low literacy skills of the parents of young children. If a parent does not have the ability to support and reinforce the efforts of others in enhancing their child's emergent literacy skills, any such effort would be seriously undermined. Parents are their children's first and most important teachers, and they must be given the skills and supports to be active participants in the process. Kingston Literacy has been at the forefront of this campaign for many years, and is working towards realizing this on a number of different fronts, both locally, regionally and provincially.

Innovative Programming:

Over the last couple of years, Kingston Literacy developed and ran a pilot project to test a model for offering Family Literacy programming in an adult literacy centre. Parents came to one of our adult literacy centres and while their child(ren) participated in a quality children's program, they worked on upgrading their own skills. The first part of the morning was spent working on regular adult upgrading skills, reading, writing, math and computers. The second part was dedicated to activities relating more to family literacy, like learning about different techniques for reading with children, trying out craft and language activities to go along with different books, and receiving information about early child, brain and language development. For the final part of the session, the parents and adult instructors joined the children and their instructors and engaged together in an activity to reinforce the morning's lessons. While it may sound fairly simple, it took a good deal of coordination and planning. The adult training components of this project are documented in one of Kingston Literacy's latest books, Family Literacy Today.

Another innovative program we are running is Bookmaking Workshops. This series of ten workshops was designed for low income parents with young children, to help them create a small collection of books for their children, learn about their child’s development, and learn more about Kingston Literacy and other upgrading and training programs in Kingston and area. The 2-hour workshops include lessons on book formats like: a predictable book, a flap book, a learning portfolio, an interactive book, an all about me book, and a touch and feel book.

We have found that this series has also acted as a gentle introduction to literacy training. Participants who may never have ended up in adult upgrading programs on their own actually began considering upgrading their skills.

Resource Creation

In the past two years, Kingston Literacy has published 2 important family literacy resources: Family Literacy Today, mentioned above, and the RAPP Collection, a series of four books each containing 10 reproducible Reading And Parents Program (RAPP) kits. Each kit contains things like reading hints, language activities, poems and song suggestions, fingerplays, and craft activities that correlate to specific quality children's books. The RAPP books are:
The Classics Collection (including kits for books like Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Franklin in the Dark, Goodnight Moon…)
Winter and Summer Collection (Red is Best, Sadie and the Snowman, We're Going on a Bear Hunt…)
Spring and Fall Collection (The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Spot Goes to School, The Little Red Hen…)
The Holidays Collection (The Secret Birthday Message, A Dark Dark Tale, Something from Nothing…)

What is to come

One of Kingston Literacy's priorities over the next twelve months is to establish a new centre in the West end that houses an ongoing integrated adult and family literacy program. At this new centre, we would like to have a dedicated child care space to be used by our programs, and other community agencies.

In the meantime, we will be continuing with our numerous programs, and striving to create a stronger community through Family Literacy.