ST. LOUIS — At Parent University, summer school isn’t just for kids. The new program from St. Louis Public Schools brings parents and caregivers into the classroom for lessons on literacy.
The four-week session includes topics on phonics, home libraries and reading to children. There are day and evening classes each week.
Parent University “makes us want to be more engaged,” said Yaya Yu, whose son is in first grade at Mason Elementary. “It’s very good to know exactly how they learn at school.”
It’s about “building that school-home connection,” said Terri King-Hunt, who taught a recent class on phonics and decoding to about 10 parents at Mullanphy Elementary in the Shaw neighborhood. “As a parent, you’re your child’s first teacher.”
King-Hunt works for Texas company Just Right Reader, which offers learn-to-read books for kids and professional development for teachers and parents.
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“We can show what’s happening in the classroom, step by step, and how to help at home,” King-Hunt said. “When you can teach something, that’s when you know you really now it.”
Parent University will continue in SLPS with free monthly classes starting in September to help “support our students by enabling our parents to become advocates and leaders for their children,” according to the program’s goals.
The outreach program is part of the district’s Literacy for the Lou initiative to build up libraries in schools and homes along with improving reading comprehension rates. About one in five SLPS students scored proficient or advanced on state tests last year.
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Dymond Ratcliff completed a worksheet at a Scholastic workshop aimed at teaching parents how to enhance literacy in children. The event took place on Tuesday, June 25, 2024, at Mullanphy Elementary School in St. Louis. Ratcliff, a parent of a second-grader and an employee at the school, was among two parents in attendance this day, along with multiple school district staff members.
Parental engagement in schools is linked to improvements in academic achievement and behavior, according to decades of research collected by the National Literacy Trust. Reading at home, in particular, can overcome economic barriers to learning, the researchers found.
King-Hunt said she commonly hears from parents who lack confidence about their own reading skills. The learn-to-read books are also helpful for adults, she said. The books, called decodables, are for working on phonics and sounding out words. But bedtime reading should be filled with engaging stories, read with inflection and fluency, she said.
Parents who aren’t ready to read bedtime stories might benefit from sites like Storyline Online, which features audio books with professional actors as readers, King-Hunt said. The July 10 session of Parent University is presented by Scholastic and focuses on “Engaging Your Child Through Read-Alouds.”
“Parent University is exciting, and doing it during the summer allows there to be a continuum with the school,” King-Hunt said.
Terri Sellers-Hatten came to the session on literacy because she has a daughter entering third grade, when it’s said students start reading to learn instead of learning to read.
“Third grade is very important, and I wanted to make sure I had the skillset to be able to support her learning,” she said. “Teaching skills to the parents will only uplift everyone.”
St. Louis Public Schools Superintendent Keisha Scarlett kicked off the district's Literacy for the Lou initiative on Thursday, Jan. 25, 2023. Video by Blythe Bernhard of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch