He turns his head and yells into the cab: "Hey, Dad! Did you get to the part where the animal attacked him in the dark cave?"

     Dad yells back through the open window: "Yeah! It sure scared me when he got stabbed in the dark. I thought he was a goner when he threw his hatchet at that porkypine."

     That scene from an Evansville street corner only makes complete sense if you can go back six months earlier and see the same ragtag father and son. The boy is literally pulling his father into a school library where a small group of parents and kids have gathered. The father mumbles, "I don't belong here. I ain't never read a book in my life."

     The leader of the group reassures him. "You don't have to be a big reader. We're here to learn how to talk to our children about some things we'll read together."

     After six months and six to eight meetings where parents and kids chose books that they would read and talk about, the father who had never read a book was sharing his thoughts with his son as they drove around on Saturday mornings earning a living by collecting cans for recycling.

Programs are important
     The Parents Sharing Books Program is only one of several family involvement programs that have shown powerful effects on kids and schools. With the simple idea of merely getting parents and children to read the same book and to share their thoughts with each other, the Parents Sharing Books Program has increased the use of books, improved family communication, and raised the level of classroom discussion by the participants.

     The Mother-Daughter Program started with the purpose of keeping low-income girls in school by bringing sixth grade girls and their mothers together for mutual support. Less than 50 percent of Hispanic girls, for example, finish high school, virtually condemning themselves to low-income jobs. In the Mother-Daughter Program, started in El Paso, the girls and their mothers meet one Saturday a month for nine months to learn about career alternatives and to learn about each other.

     During one exercise on a Saturday called "Career Day," the mothers and daughters write a contract together. In it they each pledge what they will do to achieve their future career goals. One girl, for example, wrote that she wanted to become a veterinarian. She asked her mother if she would walk each step with her to reach that goal.

     We now have longitudinal data on the mothers and daughters who joined the program six and seven years ago. Ninety-eight percent of them finished high school, versus forty-six percent of their peers. More than fifty percent of the girls in the program went on for post-secondary education versus less than ten percent of their peers.

     Another highly successful program, Make Parents Your Partners, teaches parents how to guide their children with various homework assignments. Through a series of meetings parents get a chance to see and to practice general strategies that enable them to respond helpfully to the reading, writing, and computational assignments that children are expected to do at home. Videotapes of actual parents and children help parents visualize what they are to do and to say.

Results
     From the programs that we have developed in the Family Literacy Center over the past nine years, and from those that we have reviewed from elsewhere, we can post some guidelines for schools or for individuals who want to initiate a family involvement program.

1. Change results from energetic programs, not from occasional flyers or from sporadic pleas from classroom teachers.

2. Parents want to help their children in significant ways, but they do not know what to do. They need directions. Often they need to see examples of what they are expected to do.

3. Successful programs have certain characteristics:

• They give family members actual responsibility for repeated involvement in learning activities.

• They develop the skills of participants through well-organized training sessions.

• They celebrate the successes of their participants, and they mutually solve the problems that arise.>

Leaders needed
     Programs don't happen on their own. It goes without saying that a person or a team has to step forward, identify the needs of the educational community, and then find a program that best helps that community. If you are willing to take that leadership role, our Family Literacy Center will be happy to provide you with information on the programs that we have developed and on the successful programs that we have found elsewhere. It only takes a telephone call or an e-mall message.

1-800-759-4723
e-mail: ERICCS@INDIANA.EDU
The Family Literacy Center
2805 E. l0th St. Ste. 150
Bloomington, IN 47408.