Welcome to our site!
Little Literacy Lessons for Families (2021)
is a project where families, researchers and Education students at the University of Reading (UoR) worked together
to do some fun, easy and evidence informed activities at home during lockdown 3 of the UK.
The final product is a series of 6 episodes touching upon all aspects of reading and writing for more families to watch and
get inspired and experiment with reading and writing at home.
Little Literacy Lessons for Families (2024)
In this follow up project, the videos and learning materials are translated in Ukrainian and offered to Ukrainian refugee
families with primary-age children, who settled in England between 2022-24, as a 4-months family training focusing
on empowering the family to support their child with reading and writing at home.
A group of educators, researchers and students from the University of Reading work with two communities of
Ukrainian refugees and their host communities in two towns in England. In regular meetings, families discuss recent
evidence on developing reading and writing skills in multilingual populations, the use of literacy strategies with children
as an accelerated way to develop their reading and writing skills in English, the dominant language of their host
community, and Ukrainian, their mother tongue. They then practise home-literacy activities with their children
and get individualised monthly feedback from the research team. Three monthly cycles of training – home-practice – feedback
will be completed between the beginning of March 2024 and June 2024.
The research element of the project focuses on measuring the effect of structured family training in reading and
writing development, multilingualism and literacy strategy practice at home on parents confidence in supporting
their children at home. Another main focus is to capture the voice of parents and children settling in their host communities
and a new education system to explore the barriers and enablers that this population faces in supporting their children to
become confident readers and writers in both their languages. This is the first study exploring the impact of a home-literacy
strategy oriented training for families with refugee populations and it is promising in providing evidence relevant to empowering
the family to accelerate reading and writing development of in their home-environment.
What is the evidence behind this project:
This resource is based on the findings of our research with families and teaching professionals supporting primary and secondary
school age students during the first outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also incorporates activities and strategies used
by 250 families with multilingual and monolingual children during the first two years of the pandemic. We collected free resources
for families/teachers supporting children and wrote two reports on their views.
You can explore all these, by clicking on the link bellow:
Home learning and wellbeing of children during Covid 19
What to do next:
Below, you will find links to our videos as they were uploaded on the UoR YouTube channel on a weekly basis during July and August 2021.
Enjoy the videos with your family to get inspired for fun and effective reading and writing at home with your kids:
Watch Teaser Video – Intro to the series, here:
Watch Episode 1 – Single word reading and writing for young learners, here:
Watch a fun twist of a classical tale of retold by the children participating in this project:
Watch Episode 2 – Single word reading and writing for older/more advanced learners, here:
Watch Episode 3 – First approaches to understanding text, here:
Watch Episode 4 – How to interact with text, here:
Watch Episode 5 – Creative writing at home: how to inspire and support kids, here:
Watch Episode 6 – How to make literacy activities work at home, here:
Or watch them all in the Little Literacy Lessons for Families playlist on the UoR Youtube channel by clicking here:
And, what to do after that:
Download our Free Guide for Families accompanying this series with more ideas for activities and step-by-step guidance by clicking on Free Guide for Families
And, then you can also do that:
If you have watched our episodes and/or tried the activities with your children at home, we want to hear from you!
Please give us feedback by clicking on Join the conversation to interact with other families in our community or contact me directly at a.tsakalaki@reading.ac.uk
If interested in formal schooling, you can also watch Anna’s recent video on teaching reading and writing creatively in schools, here:
and find out more about teaching Maths-specific vocabulary through storytelling, drama and arts on our Transferable Vocabulary website: