Claudia Sanchez

Encouraging Spanish-Speaking Families' Involvement Through Dichos

Culturally and linguistically appropriate strategies for family involvement are essential to ensure successful home–school partnerships. This article explores the use of dichos, or popular sayings in the Spanish language, as tools that may have the potential to enhance school–home communication. Given their authenticity as constructs of the Latino culture and their prevalence in everyday oral discourse for the transmission of values and beliefs, dichos should facilitate communication with Latino Spanish-speaking families. The article provides examples of ways in which schools can use dichos to promote behaviors supportive of childrens literacy development at home.

Family Concepts in Early Learning and Development Standards.

This exploratory study investigated the use of concepts related to families, parents, and the home in 51 state-level early learning and development standards documents. Guidelines from six national family involvement, engagement, and school-partnership models were used to create the Family Involvement Models Analysis Chart (FIMAC), which served as this studys analysis tool. Results showed that the vast majority of units examined did not align with family involvement guidelines from the six national models. In addition, the small percentage of units that aligned with national models – as well as the units related to family concepts that were not aligned with these models – tended to incorporate family concepts in the contextual narrative of the standards documents and not within the letter of the standards in their strict sense (the statements describing what students are supposed to know and be able to do). States desiring to implement early learning and development standards congruent with research-based practices should integrate families into standards documentation.