Literacy Beyond the Classroom: Strengthening Partnerships Between Teachers and Caregivers

Every day, educators work to nurture young readers and writers, building both skills and confidence one lesson at a time. We know that the most powerful literacy growth happens when school and home work together. Research confirms that children who have robust at-home literacy experiences often are both more engaged and successful in the literacy classroom (Literacy Project Foundation, 2019). Families and caregivers are already doing meaningful things with language, story, and communication in their daily lives, and when we, as educators, connect around those experiences, everyone benefits. 

At the same time, broader trends remind us why nurturing a love of reading and writing matters so much.  Reading engagement has shifted in recent years, with only 48% of adults reporting that they’ve read one or more books for pleasure in the past year, and the percentage of 13-year-olds who report reading for fun almost every day dropping from 27% in 2012 to just 14% in 2023 (National Endowment for the Arts, 2022; National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2023). These trends reflect a cultural moment that we are all navigating together and point to a real opportunity for caregivers and schools to work side-by-side. Educators can offer guidance and material support to families and caregivers. In addition, teachers and literacy leaders can learn from families and caregivers about literacy experiences outside of the classroom, so that we are more equipped to fold these experiences and this knowledge into our classroom practices. 

The good news is that families need not be literacy experts to make a meaningful difference. By sharing practical evidence-based strategies with families and caregivers, we can extend our impact beyond the school walls to help encourage home and school environments where joyful literacy thrives. Teachers College Advancing Literacy offers workshops and a corresponding podcast to support the partnership between teachers and families and caregivers – all with the goal of Advancing Literacy Beyond the Classroom. The following tips and family-facing resources (color | black and white) can help support teachers in this important work. 

First, encourage families and caregivers to create access to reading materials and dedicated space. Families need not have elaborate home libraries or invest in expensive materials. Instead, help families to understand that diverse reading materials—graphic novels, magazines, audiobooks, recipe books, comic strips, and websites—all count as legitimate reading. A comfortable corner with good lighting, free of distraction, and a basket of varied texts signals to children that reading is valued. Educators can also provide access to books by sending home texts from the school or classroom library as well as sharing information about community resources such as public libraries, Little Free Libraries, digital library apps, and book exchange programs. If book access is limited for families in your community, you might consider ways to support families with bolstering home book collections through partnerships with organizations like First Book, which provides free and low-cost books for children living in low-income communities across North America, or Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which provides free books to children from birth to five in participating communities across the United States, Canada, and Ireland. When families have access to and see diverse reading materials as valuable resources for their home, children are more likely to find texts that genuinely interest them. 

Second, help families and caregivers establish reading routines that work for their lives. Rather than prescribing specific durations or times for reading, encourage families to find authentic moments for reading together. This might look like bedtime stories, reading aloud while cooking, listening to audiobooks on the way to travel sports meets, or setting aside 15 minutes each day where everyone in the family reads their own materials in the same room. The key to successful reading routines is consistency, so caregivers will want to think about ways to make reading a natural, recurring part of everyday life rather than a special event or obligation. As an educator, consider how you might support and validate routines that will look different in every household. 

Third, emphasize the power of discussing texts together. As younger students’ decoding and word recognition skills become more automatized and texts grow more linguistically complex, listening comprehension becomes more and more critical to reading comprehension (Hogan, Adlof, & Alonzo, 2014). This means that conversations about texts with children of all ages matter enormously. Families don’t need to be literacy experts to have meaningful conversations about books. Encourage parents and caregivers to ask simple questions like, “What did you think about that?”, “What surprised you?”, or “Does this remind you of anything?” This invites children to think critically and share their perspectives. Additionally, encourage families to keep conversations (about books as well as any other life topic or question!) going beyond a single exchange. After a child responds, adults can ask follow-up questions like, “Why do you think that happened?”, or “Tell me more about that,” or share their own thoughts to continue the dialogue. Extended back-and-forth conversation helps children elaborate on their thinking, making deeper connections, and developing more sophisticated comprehension skills. Invite families to connect over the media they already love, whether that's books, movies, news stories, social media posts, or song lyrics. These types of conversations build valuable comprehension skills while also demonstrating that adults genuinely value children’s ideas and interpretations. 

Fourth, support families and caregivers in making storytelling and writing consistent and purposeful. Oral storytelling is a powerful literacy practice that requires no materials or preparation. Research demonstrates that narrative skill at school entry predicts writing and reading comprehension up to ten years later (Spencer & Peterson, 2022). Encourage families to share stories from their own lives, cultural traditions, and family history. These types of narratives provide children with rich language experiences and model ways of structuring stories. Equally important, caregivers can also invite children to tell their own stories and help find authentic audiences for their writing. That might mean writing letters to faraway friends or relatives, creating birthday cards, composing emails to local officials about community issues, helping maintain a family blog, or writing reviews of books or games they enjoy. When children see the authentic ways that their words can inform, entertain, persuade, or connect with real people, writing feels like a truly meaningful form of expression. If you’re interested in thinking more about ways that oral language can support kids with writing both at school and home, we recommend checking out this earlier blog post on Bolstering Conversations to Build Power and Voice in Writing. 

Finally, remind families and caregivers of the importance of modeling reading for pleasure. Children learn from what they see, and if they rarely see the adults in their lives reading for enjoyment, the message they receive, however unintentional, is that reading is something that you stop doing once you finish school. Research shows that parents with strong reading skills who serve as constructive reading role models are more likely to raise children who excel in reading (Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002; Yeo et al., 2014). Encourage caregivers to let children see them reading, whether that’s enjoying reading before bed, reading recipes to plan a family dinner, or getting absorbed in a magazine. When adults share what they are reading and why they find it interesting or important, they demonstrate that reading is a valuable, enjoyable, lifelong activity. 

Interested in sharing these and other strategies for supporting literacy at home with families and caregivers? Check out these free printable resources: Five Practical Tips for Supporting Literacy at Home (Color) | Five Practical Tips for Supporting Literacy at Home (Black and White) or this earlier blog post on Six New Book Recommendations that Span Genre, Topic, and Form. 

If you’d like more tips on supporting at-home literacy, be sure to join and share our FREE Online Family and Caregiver Workshop Series. You can also listen to our Advancing Literacy Beyond the Classroom Podcast.