Every day, we send our kids off to school hoping they will learn something - anything - and grow into knowledgeable, successful adults. But while we deal with the daily details of that thing called life, we sometimes forget to encourage learning at home.
Parents are a child's first teacher. Even after they've started school, it's important to ensure that family learning continues at home every day. Kids look up to their parents and mimic many of their daily routines. Spending just 15 minutes a day with them can go a long way to help children develop a love of learning and improve their literacy skills.
"Learning together as a family is vital to a child's future education," says Margaret Eaton, president of ABC Life Literacy Canada. "Doing family literacy activities not only helps develop children's reading, writing and math skills, it also provides an opportunity for parents to learn something new, too."
Approximately nine million adult Canadians suffer from low literacy, and hundreds of thousands of these individuals have children.
Some of these children end up falling behind in school because they are not given the same opportunity as their peers to read at home.
Research shows that children raised in literate households are likely to enter grade one with several thousand hours of one-toone pre-reading experience behind them, so it's important to ensure learning takes place in the home.
It's understandable that parents lead busy lives and may not have time to read a bedtime story to their children; some parents also have low reading confidence. One way or another, it means many children hardly ever enjoy a bedtime story.
Luckily, there are so many learning opportunities that happen in our day-to-day lives - fun, easy activities that are part of our daily routines and don't feel like learning.
Spending time playing a board game, writing out a shopping list, counting out change at the grocery store or following a recipe all incorporate literacy and learning.
In honour of September's Life Literacy Month and Raise-a-Reader Day, ABC Life Literacy Canada offers 10 fun and easy ways to make literacy part of your family's daily life.
1. When making your grocery list, have your child write out the items you need to buy.
2. At the store, ask your child to count out the money to make the purchase.
3. Make it a habit to read a story together at bedtime. 4. When cooking dinner, involve your children in measuring the ingredients. This helps them understand fractions and measurements.
5. Driving is the perfect opportunity to practice literacy. Read signs, billboards and licence plates together, and show your children the proper way to read a map.
6. While on the Internet, make time to research something new that your family is interested in. Researching skills are important and help with reading and comprehension.
7. In the car, sing along to songs on the radio. Singing encourages learning patterns of words, rhymes and rhythms, and is strongly connected to language skills. 8. When playing a board game, read the instructions aloud to each other or count how many spaces to travel around the board.
9. Involve your kids when you pay bills. This will teach them strong financial skills early on in life. 10. Children follow by example, so ensure learning is part of your daily life.
Spending time doing learning activities at home is crucial. Practicing these activities will help develop a love of learning for both parents and children, and help to develop literacy skills.
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