The room was packed last Friday at College Park Elementary's Motheread!
Motheread is an evidenced-based family literacy program open to all adult family members. To increase children's literacy, CPE has hosted groups once a month for the past four years.
"This is our first year having them back in-person," Kimberly Rogers, title I facilitator, said.
However, a stranger wouldn't be able to tell that the pandemic put a dent in Motheread's attendance at all. Through word-of-mouth, parents have come back in full force to attend the bilingual reading session with Rogers and Carla Hogue, an ESOL teacher who co-teaches and translates the books/lessons into Spanish for parents at Motheread.
"Not only do they walk away with the book that we’ll read today with them, but we’ll show them strategies on how to work with books at home with their kids," Hogue said.
In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, last week's session focused on a Cuban folktale, "The Bossy Gállito." As a dual language book, it tells the story of a bossy rooster as he prepares to get ready for his uncle's wedding in English and Spanish.
"At a first grade level, the kids are still learning their phonetic sounds," Hogue said. "And Spanish is phonetic, so they can easily adapt to it."
Since younger students are more adept at picking up a new language, the hope is that students will be able to discuss the book with their parents in English or Spanish and be one step closer to becoming global learners and better readers.
Original source can be found here.
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