Project Read Families For Literacy (FFL) Story Hours: Downtown & Fair Oaks Branch Libraries
It was another fun and engaging couple of nights at our two September Story Hours, held at the downtown library and the Fair Oaks Branch Library. Over 75 learners and their families attended the Project READ FFL Story Hour at the Downtown Library and an additional 65 Kids in Partnership (KIP) learners and their families attended the story hour held at the Fair Oaks Library Branch. Students came back excited from starting off the school year, many of them with their new backpacks. Each Story Hour, Magic Dan started the night off with an interactive magic show that included our students and families. Each family was given a beautiful family book to take home with them, and all were welcome to select their own titles from our collection of books. Hands On Bay Area (HOBA) volunteers were on hand per usual to help our young ones create pre-literacy crafts with household or recycled materials, so they are able to duplicate these projects at home with their families. Family learning and fun for all!
Project READ Book Club in the Family Literacy Instructional Center (FLIC)
This month we offered three Book Clubs for our youngest learners and parents. With the help of our Junior League volunteers, close to 15 young learners took part in each round table Book Club, reading or being read to. Students then created a related pre-literacy craft project with the help of our Junior League and teen and preteen tutors. Book Club has become a popular event at FLIC, where both children and parents are welcome. This month we focused on “Back to School” books and crafts. After each Book Club session, parents and children are able to successfully practice reading the family book together at home.
Project READ Game Night at FLIC!
Project READ’s Game Night, last year’s pilot program created to work on language acquisition, continues to build momentum. Approximately 20 students took part in September’s Game Night! Held at the end of each month, is an exciting incentive for our students and a fun way to build community and language and literacy skills. This month students played Tell Tale, a collaborative storytelling game, Let’s Talk, a conversation starter and HedBandz, a deductive reasoning game of ‘Who Am I?’ as well as others. New games are introduced each month to expose students to new activities and to work on varied focus areas. Our teen tutors have helped make this a successful program by taking part in the games and modeling language and appropriate team building techniques. Thank you tween and teens!
Families In Partnership
This month the Project READ Families in Partnership (FIP) program celebrated over 50 active pairs.
The Sequoia S.A.F.E program matches Sequoia high school students in a dual academic literacy program, which is part of our KIP program model. The Sequoia teens are matched with learners in Kinder and first grade, focusing on pre-intervention literacy services. Currently we have matched 12 learners and tutors who meet once a week for an hour. Learners and tutors read together, work on homework, educational games, and arts and crafts. This dual intervention program is created to improve the reading levels of our tutors as well as our learners. In order to determine literacy skill gain we administer pre and post assessments to track the reading levels of both our learners and tutors.
Adult Inmate Programs
This month as part of our dual-intervention peer-tutoring program in the San Mateo County Jails, we offered a critical literacy workshop to thirteen inmate tutors. Participants read an excerpt from Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio by world-renowned poet and author Jimmy Santiago Baca. In the chapter “Coming into Language” participants learned that Baca taught himself to read and write while incarcerated. He discovered the power of language, and through education he found a way to overcome injustice. By choosing reading materials that are relevant to the lives of the men in the workshop, we seek to help students go beyond basic comprehension and begin to make connections between the text and personal experience. Our goal is that students will also be critical of what they read and begin to ask questions that pose alternatives. Students will find creative ways to develop strategies for solving problems presented in the text and challenges in their own lives.
Eight men graduated from Tutor Training to become peer tutors in San Mateo County Jail.
Adult Computer Literacy Lab for English Language acquisition and phonics
Project READ adult Learner/Tutor pairs worked together for more than 155 hours in September. Five new learner/tutor pairs were matched. They, along with the other adult pairs, focused on their reading and writing skills using techniques such as exploring novels, reading newspapers and working on job related skills. One learner, with the help of her tutor, passed part of her Registered Dental Assistant Examination. She is now one step closer to her goal of becoming a Registered Dental Assistant.
Adult Computer Literacy Lab for English Language Acquisition and Phonics
Forty-three adults, including 11 new adult learners used computer aided learning programs in our Literacy Computer Lab this month. They worked to improve their pronunciation, vocabulary, reading and spelling skills using Rosetta Stone and Lexia Core 5 learning programs. Overall, these Project READ Adults logged in 257 hours this month in the Project READ Adult Literacy Computer Lab, of these 11 were new to Project READ in the month of September.