Blog-a-Thon (Final Post)
In the beginning, my thoughts were all over the place. I had no idea what sort of family literacy event I wanted to put on in my building. The one thing that I did know, was that my school had a strong push for more family engagement. As a member of the family engagement committee in my building, I felt that this would be a way to to increase the amount of family engagement. The 2020-2021 school year has been adjustment after adjustment for students, families and teachers alike. I felt like families in our community needed a way to voice how they were feeling. That was a starting point. Initially, I was going to put on this sort of event on my own and within my own building. However, after meeting with two other fellows in my school district (and our mentees), we decided to put on the event collectively- hoping that we would get more participation.
There was no way that we would be able to pretend the pandemic never happened. There was no way that we could pretend that Covid hadn’t impacted the lives of those in our community. With this in mind, our goal was to give families a sense of voice, while highlighting more positive than negative. We specifically hoped to shed light on the ways that Covid hadn’t canceled community. In fact, it seemed to create more of a community among us.
We were able to get the support of our district and had our literacy event pushed out on the district’s social media platforms. Each of us (fellows) pushed out the the literacy project to our classrooms. We were hopeful that we would have an immense amount of participants. I mean, who wouldn’t want the opportunity to speak about being one year into a pandemic? In all we had around 20 student families participate. Each participant received a gift card to a local book shop to foster their own literacy development.
The overall process of developing and putting on a family literacy project caused us to run into a few challenges. From deciding when to launch the project, to our technology platform (FlipGrid) being banned in the district for a period of time. However, we were still able to push forward with the project. I think that this was a great way to implement use of technology, since student families were familiar with it anyway.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to develop and host our family literacy project!
