“Read with me”: How teachers in Aarhus support parents to improve their children's reading skills

Change management

The City of Aarhus has the ambition of engaging citizens and professionals in an effort to improve education outcomes through two co-production initiatives:

• the Early Childhood Programme, targeted at young children aged 3-6 years
• The READ Programme, focussed on children aged 8-9 years.

The Early Childhood Programme

The Municipality of Aarhus had evidence from an earlier co-production experiment – The Early Childhood Programme led by Morten Jakobsen and Simon Calmar Andersen from Aarhus University – that supplying immigrant parents with a suitcase containing children’s books, games, and a tutorial DVD about language development techniques had a remarkably positive effect on language proficiency among the most challenged immigrant pre-school children. In the Early Childhood Programme, the Municipality of Aarhus and Aarhus University were engaged in a joint effort to inform parents of bilingual children at pre-school about why it is important to read with their children and how best to read with their children; moreover, it provided them with resources to do this reading. Since the parents and children were bilingual, all materials were supplied in several languages. The results of the evaluation of The Early Childhood Programme showed that most parents – despite their social background – were willing and able to support their children’s language development, if given adequate tools.

The suitcases were delivered to the parents by the municipality via the professionals at pre-schools. The suitcases were free of charge to the parents. An important part of the initiative was the interaction between the parents and the professionals.

READ

READ is a follow-up programme to the Early Childhood Programme and is provided in schools in Aarhus. The children taking part in the Early Childhood Programme were in 2^nd and 3^rd grade in 2013, which is why this age group was chosen for the follow-up programme. This allowed research to identify whether an early co-production approach at pre-school level was more effective than a later intervention at school level and whether two interventions involving the same child are better than one intervention or none at all.

The READ project provides an invitation to parents to help their child read in short periods of 15 minutes each day or as often as possible.

The project ran for one year and on two occasions provided parents with instructions on how they can support their children’s reading. During the first stage, teachers provided parents and children with books and instructions on how to engage in shared reading, and how to find additional reading resources either online, at the library or at the school. The schoolteachers were instructed to provide additional reading materials tailored to the competencies of each child.  Four months later, the teachers provided parents and children with additional books and instructions, now with a focus on reading aloud (in the 2^nd grade) and numeracy (in the 3^rd grade). Again parents were provided with information on how to support their children and were given different materials to do so.

The information provided to the parents included:

• research-based information about the importance of their involvement in their child’s education.
• suggestions about how to create a peaceful environment, where their child would have a chance to sit down and focus for 15 minutes on their reading.
• instructions on how to support their child – for instance, by asking open-ended questions about what they are reading and other kinds of dialogue techniques.

Inspired by the research on reading and on having dialogues around reading, a leaflet and a film was produced to show how parents can talk with the child about the content of the text. The main message for parents was that, when reading with their children, they should focus on the child's comprehension of the text and, especially, that they should have a conversation about the text to enhance their child’s understanding. All parents - regardless of their own reading ability or linguistic background – can speak with their child about the pictures and the contents of the text by bringing in their own and their child's experiences of the world. This thereby contributes to the child's most important learning about reading: understanding that content is the purpose of reading.