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One of the more common factors bringing adults into literacy programs is a desire to serve as role models for their children. LVA has a long-term commitment to family literacy services, enabling parents, caregivers, and children to enhance their skills together.
Successful family literacy programs:
- Include natural routines found in the home and community of parents, children, and extended family members. These may be sharing stories and ideas through conversations or reading, writing lists or notes, communicating with teachers, following directions, and so on.
- Encompass formal and/or informal activities with varying degrees of systematic adult and child interactions. Activities may be purposefully planned by the agency to increase adult proficiencies and/or developmentally appropriate literacy skills of children. They also include activities naturally used by families as they go about their daily routine.
- Focus on parents/caregivers as facilitators of learning. Programs help adults improve their basic skills while modeling how to work with their children.
- Promote ongoing family learning and positive family interactions to support the literacy-related behaviors and values of all individuals
Beginning in 1994, the LVA/Verizon Family Literacy Initiative integrated technology with family literacy instruction. The proper hardware, combined with an array of software or Internet sites, provides the flexibility to enable parents and children to benefit from technology-based instruction, whether working individually or as families.
Today, more than 45 Verizon Family Learning Centers nationwide are testimony to Verizon's contributions of over $1 million in financial and technological support of LVA's work in family literacy and technology.
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