Preschool for ELLs: Family Involvement

How can preschool programs create a welcoming environment? What’s needed to build strong partnerships with their families? Please join me for Part Four of this Colorin Colorado webcast, Preschool for English Language Learners.

[Music] Hello. I’m Bethanne Patrick. Welcome to this Colorin Colorado webcast, Preschool for English Language Learners. In the first three sections, we discussed instruction of young English Language Learners, or ELL’s, and professional development. Now we’ll look at the role families can play in their children’s preschool education. Thank you, Dr. Becky Palacios.

Becky Palacios: Thank you.

Bethanne Patrick: Becky, let’s start a conversation about access to early childhood education programs. We know that preschool program slots are limited nationally. In your community, what kinds of access do families of young ELL’s have to preschool?

Becky Palacios: Well, it all depends on the community, and in ours, it looked at children that were… had basic needs and they could be homeless, they could be English Language Learners, or they could have qualified on the basis of need, of financial need. So, depends around the country different types of programs, but ours, we really looked at those with special types of needs.

Bethanne Patrick What was the level of interest in these preschool programs for your families?

Becky Palacios: We had a waiting list. It was wonderful. I mean, people know the richness of an early childhood program. They know how important it is to the children’s development, and we had luckily a program with three and four year olds that helped bridge up to kindergarten, so our program was very rich in providing two extra years of schooling for English Language Learners. Those children came to us with the ability to come…with needs, but we really capitalized on their strengths and not their weaknesses, and really developed a lot of language learning ability with the partnership of the families.

Bethanne Patrick: What are some of the effective ways for preschool programs to reach emigrant and ELL families?

Becky Palacios: Well, I think that one of the things that’s very important is the personal touch. If you don’t have that personal connection and the personal welcome and warmth, it’s going to be lacking, and most of us look for that wherever we go whether we go to a store, we go to a church, wherever we seek social situations, where people are going to be accepting, and that was one of the very first things that we knew in our program we needed to have is a person that’s going to say, “Hey, I’m glad you’re here, you know, let’s see what we can do. This is how our program works. We like to see how you can help fit some of those pieces that we need in our program, and let me tell you what is part of the program, what are the actual components of it.” So we provide orientation for the families ahead of time. We brought in the children ahead of time so they could see the classrooms, and those are very important, not just in preschool programs, but throughout English Language Learners teaching careers because you’re going to have different teachers throughout those years, and you need to meet who those people are, and those teachers need to be very warm and accepting.

Bethanne Patrick: So, how can the staff support newcomer parents who have recently arrived?

Becky Palacios: Well, there’s a lot of different ways. Meetings are one of them. You can bring parents in by themselves. You can provide, you know, sitters if that’s something your schools can sustain. We did parent meetings where we included the children. We used them as, you know, models for, if you’re holding a baby, you could say this is how you walk, this is how you sing, these are some examples, and so forth. So, parent meetings where you can do a survey ahead of time and ask them, “What are the needs you want?” You use them in their native language types of surveys. If you have somebody that can translate it, say what are some of those needs that you have? So, not just what I think is important for them, but what do they need from me. Is it nutrition? Is it rearing children? Is it they, themselves, learning a second language?

You can have a parent facilitator that helps and is part of your team. We have a wonderful person that in our group, and still have, who is our family facilitator who works for the families. I would be comfortable going to her and saying, “I have six parents that really, really want to learn to read English. What can you do?” And she would set it in motion. So it’s not uncommon for me to also be teaching the parents even though it was part of my role but she would sustain that growth over time for them.

Bethanne Patrick: Which program materials should preschools make available in the native languages of the parents?

Becky Palacios: Well, I think that anything that goes out for children to learn. One of the things that I did as a teacher was create a little just a one page simple pictorial vocabulary word list. Now a lot of children have spelling list, well, I have vocabulary lists. So we were studying about insect families, and I was going to have the English and the Spanish word on the picture for grasshopper or for ant or for whatever we were studying there so the parents could take it home and were also learning. So materials that are used in the classroom, materials that go home to the parents from the nurse, from the counselor, from the school, all those are very important, and especially at my school I help translate a lot of those documents so that they would go home to the parents and they could read them.

Otherwise, the parents would come to me and say, “What does this say?” But that was part of my access to be able to say, “Sure, let me tell you. This is what we’re going to need for tomorrow. Your child needs this next week or this is asking about a survey.” So parents are going to ask anyway. They felt very comfortable with me coming and asking me if they got a document only in English or only in a language they couldn’t understand.

Bethanne Patrick: You’ve talked a lot about home-schooled partnerships as a two-way street. So, can you explain what you mean by that and why you think a two-way street is so important?

Becky Palacios: Well, I think it’s valuing who people are because I think a lot of times schools don’t realize that we do a lot of top-down, a lot of, you know, I’m telling you what to do. This is what I need you to do, and even though that’s ok, it’s got to be a two-way street where I’m learning from them. There are some things they do at home, things that they can share that they can bring in that really enriches the school environment, and if they have that comfort level of coming into the school and being part of it and the children see them active in the school and playing an important role in the school and in the classroom, then those children are likely going to experience more success in their school career when their families are involved.

Becky Palacios: Well, I always told the parents, you continue your native speaking ability. That’s your culture, your connection, your emotional attachment to your family. That’s what holds your family together, and as you’re learning the second language together and you’re learning all these other things, why not? That’s what learning is about…learning about science, learning about music, learning about other languages. It’s all about learning. It’s education. So you sustain what you already know, and you grow in other ways that you’d want to grow in.

Bethanne Patrick: If children are struggling with reading and language difficulties, what can parents do to help?

Becky Palacios: Well, I think that we need to recognize that in ourselves first if that’s something that is developmental or it’s something the parent doesn’t need to worry about at that point, but when the parent makes me aware of let’s just say a speech problem or something that’s going on in the home when it comes to maybe an emotional crisis or something, then the family needs to let us know and be aware, and we need to support them with bilingual types of conversations where they’re also confidential with the nurse, using the counselor, or whoever is involved in that situation, but also being the bridge to that communication, that collaboration, with that team and not having a parent feel intimidated about bringing others into that type of situation.

Bethanne Patrick: Regardless of language level and ability, what can parents with limited schooling get from the staff in terms of building their confidence and getting their input encouraged?

Becky Palacios: Well, there’s a lot of things that we can do. One of the things that I started in my school was a lending library, “Lending and Learning Library” is what we called it, and we had books, I wrote a small grant. I can’t believe how much it really yielded us over time. This may be like $1,000 grant, and I bought as many books with cassettes, back then, as I could. They didn’t come on CD’s when I wrote this grant, but we bought cassette players also with this $1,000. It took us a long way, and the parents checked those out. A lot of them already had cassettes, but those that didn’t were able to take them home. They didn’t have to learn to read, but they could just sit with their child for ten or fifteen minutes, you know, listen to the story, discuss the story in whatever language they felt comfortable in, because it’s all about developing concepts, developing oral vocabulary in the home, and I can work with whatever they work on because I can bridge that when they come to the classroom.

Bethanne Patrick: Well what are some other ways that staffs can encourage literacy at home?

Becky Palacios: Well, they can, the school can create little books as the children are working. I told you before that sometimes I have my students draw, or we take pictures of what they’re working in, little books they can send home, little booklets of activities as we’re learning to read. They can also go to the public library and check out some books that are very important. Those are free. They can come to the school library in many different instances where they can check them out and bring them back, and it just depends on the school situation, but the public library is one of the greatest resources that they can get a hold of that they can go in and just spend some time there. There’s activities that the parents can do at home with those books that are checked out, and we can bridge those types of ideas on the Colorin Colorado website, there’s a lot of strategies and activities.

Bethanne Patrick: Well, and from the website as well, and also in the library, there are songs and nursery rhymes, so could you tell us a little bit about ways that families use this to bridge the gap between school and home?

Becky Palacios: Sure. A lot of the times we’ll have songs and traditions that are carried on from generation to generation that are very important, and that like, for example, grandma sang to me, and, you know, I’m singing to my grandchildren now, and when we do those types of oral language pieces, the children realize that we value language, and they’re able to create that language learning environment in the home, but it doesn’t have to be things that they can go and check out and buy. They can go to the grocery store and walk children through the store and say, “This is an apple. This is this, and guess where it was grown. Let’s look at the sticker. Oh my gosh, it was grown in Guatemala,” you know, and you’re talking about geography, and you’re talking about countries. You’re opening children’s eyes to the world. The grocery store is one of the best places I think we can take kids on a “geographical walk”.

Bethanne Patrick: That’s wonderful. Let’s take a final look at the big picture. Why is it so important for a preschool program to connect with its greater community?

Becky Palacios: Well, because we want to make sure that when these children understand that connection with who they are and who they want to be and how they fit into society, when they see all the greater community coming in and playing a part in their growth and their environment, it’s a comment upon the teacher to bring that community in. We want to show them what is there. I think one of the greatest things that I remember doing was bringing in community members to come and speak about their jobs and their work, and it wasn’t just during the week of community type of learning. It was throughout the year because these folks are really vested in early childhood. You’d be surprised how many people out there admire and support early childhood growth and especially early childhood dual language programs, bilingual programs.

We do have huge proponents of second language acquisition, and as I’ve traveled around the world, I’ve been to various countries around the world, all of them support language learning as a way to develop the brain to become creative thinkers and problem solvers, and so when we’re giving children the gift of language, you’re giving it to them at a formative age when it really makes that impact on your brain development because we’re teaching second language programs in high school and college, we really don’t have the ability to practice in this context that will never happen again.

Bethanne Patrick: Well, and that’s a good point because the community comes in, as you said and has a great interest, but how can the preschool help to build and maintain that connection?

Becky Palacios: Well, I think part of it is, I guess, twofold. One is bringing the world in to the children, but bringing that program out to the world, and keeping it visible in a PR kind of situation, talking about its positive impact on the children, its merits, its research, what the school is doing, you know, using it in a website, showcasing it in the school’s website-things that can be done that will really support second language learning for children.

Bethanne Patrick: What about non-profit social services and their role?

Becky Palacios: Well there’s quite a few that do support the school, the school district, and it just depends on how the teacher is supported in that school environment. For example, I was able to acquire those interactive white boards through that greater school community writing grants to people that I knew supported early childhood learning and second language learning. So when preschool programs and teachers in those programs are aware of their resources in the community and who are the proponents of your program, they’re likely going to be your best donors and funders.

Bethanne Patrick: Well, thank you for all of this wonderful information, Becky. Any final thoughts?

Becky Palacios: I’m thinking that one of the best things that we’ve ever done when it comes to the American Federation of Teachers is to support the ColorinColorado.org website because this has been a huge asset in my community and the people that I’ve outreached around the world, as I’ve traveled around the world and I’ve shown them the ability to go to the website and to learn more about it, the ability to have it available for families is also huge, and so I would encourage anyone that is working with English Language Learners to please go to the website and to learn more about it.

Bethanne Patrick: Excellent. Thank you so much, Dr. Rebecca Palacios.

Becky Palacios: Thank you.

Bethanne Patrick: You can learn more about English Language Learners and watch the other segments of this webcast at www.ColorinColorado.org. Funding for this Colorin Colorado webcast is provided by the American Federation of Teachers with additional support from the National Council of La Raza.

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