I don;'t know how many of you know about it, but I recently learned 
about a program called HIPPY-- Home Instruction for Parents of 
Preschool Youth.   It is a very well-established program developed 
originally in Israel in the 1970's that provides three years of 
30-modules each year of highly structured pre-literacy skills for 
parents to teach to children.  The parent is first taught the skill by 
a Home Instructor who teaches through role play, demonstration and use 
of a very wide variety of supplies and materials.  Parents are taught 
to use objects and materials found in the home to practice pre-literacy 
skills with their children-- sorting, color recognition, sound 
recognition, etc. --  a little story book with a very simple story 
provides a focus for questions and answer activities about sequence of 
events, and many activities go with the books-- matching cut outs of 
wheels to trucks, oars to boats, etc.  All senses are stressed and 
lessons build nicely on the previous knowledge  . Parents are taught to 
do one set of activities per day for 15-20 minutes with a 3-5 yr old 
(but for ESL learners it could be much older children--the vocabulary 
is core CALPS--language needed to understand children's books).   It is 
really a remarkable program in many ways and provides the same 
preliteracy skills for the preliterate adults that the children need 
and get.

Unfortunately, it is not entirely suitable for ESL because the stories 
are of course vocabulary-  and grammar- laden, and can be quite 
challenging for someone new to English, simple though they appear.  
However, if an ESL instructor were using them to both teach ESL and 
pre-literacy skills to parents to teach their children, they could 
possibly be quite powerful.   HIPPY is used in about 6 or 7 countries, 
all English-speaking, but the materials are available in Spanish, too.  
  My only real objection is that they are extremely culturally biased to 
middle class American values--but again, that could be a teaching 
point, rather than a detriment.

Check them out--I don't have a website for the program-- the materials 
I saw come from the HIPPY center at the University of North Texas.    I 
saw them used in a program in Ft. Worth.    Again, I caution that 
language and culture are issues to address, but the pre-literacy skills 
and very basic literacy  as well as the activities used to teach them 
are amazingly well addressed.

Robin Schwarz

-----Original Message-----
From: DonMcCabe at aol.com
To: englishlanguage at nifl.gov
Sent: Fri, 13 Jan 2006 20:41:25 EST
Subject: Re: [EnglishLanguage] preliterate parents

In a message dated 1/13/2006 3:56:38 P.M.  Eastern Standard Time,
k2moriarty at yahoo.com writes:
I am interested in  finding out what materials and
methods adult esl instructors have used to  help their
nonliterate/preliterate adult students (who are
parents)  support the emergent literacy skills of their
own children? I realize this  may seem a post for the
family literacy discussion group (and will post  there
as well) - but I would like like to gather information
from as many  sources as possible.

Dear Kathleen,
You really should check out the ***www.spelling.org*** website.  The  
AVKO
Foundation even offers FREE Lesson plans for the teaching of parents in 
how  to
help their children who have reading and spelling problems.  It also 
has  FREE
a curriculum for both adults and children that teaches handwriting
(manuscript and cursive), keyboarding, reading, and spelling AS it 
methodically

teaches the alphabet and the sounds of the letters as they occur 
regularly  in
patterns.

Don McCabe
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