Learning Home Volunteers

In our program, the child's first teachers, their parents, continue in their roles of the educator but instead of the learning being adult led, it is child led. This is a significant change in the relationship that parents have with their child, but an essential one. To help our parents make this change, our family coordinator is key. Not only are they responsible for bringing learning materials to the home every three weeks but maintaining a relationship with the parents. During their visits with the parents, they get to hear about each child's exploration and mastery. They answer questions that may have come up during the learning session. Finally, they are responsible for all supportive materials development which include the video sessions regarding activity learning ideas, surveys and intake activities are done by the family coordinator as well. This close relationship is reason for our high level of parent engagement which currently is 100%! Their intimate relationship allows us to be able to help with other barriers which our families face which affects their child's ability to learn - hunger, housing insecurity, language barriers, and a multitude of other issues. Our program coordinators are to connect our families to the resources that they need through the network of non-profits we have made connections with. We have been able to use our relationship to extend the learning of both the parents and their children - providing custom learning activities for each child and support for different teaching methods.

Our secret sauce is our learning sessions. Sessions focus on a single topic, i.e. like flowers, and will contain 7 to 13 individual learning activities for the parent and the child to explore together. We design each learning activity to meet the needs of a 2 year old just as elegantly as a 5 year old and the match the learning styles of both a careful cautious child as well as a busy active learner. Every activity offers opportunities for language, support for mastering pre-k academic skills and for building learning agility skills. Oh and the activities MUST be fun! We test the learning activities, incorporating materials that can be found in the home and keeping costs low. Once the "lesson" is fully designed, we turn it over to our volunteers who manufacture, package and document the activities. All lessons are accompanied by 3-4 books read aloud by our storyteller. Finally we create videos, in both English and Spanish, to introduce the learning activity materials, its purpose and ideas for using the learning materials. The learning kits are prepared for each learner. Each gets the session's materials and custom learning activities based on their interests. In addition, we add donated books in either English or Spanish. The learning kits are brought to the home and exchanged for the previous session learning kit. During the learning session, our families set their own pace. Some work with their children every day, others only on the weekends. Connecting on our closed social media network, they watch the accompanying learning session videos and post pictures and videos of their family engaging with the learning activities. This becomes documentation of cherished learning firsts, laughter, failed activities and obsession and mess of learning.

Train and support parents to foster learning in a child-directed play program: Each parent is trained on the adult's role in child-directed play. Training includes both online training (1.5 hours) and in-person training (3 hrs). Ongoing training is provided through Classtag and in person visits by our family coordinators. Our families lack basic resources in the home for working with their children and 90% of our families have no children books in the home. As part of the training, we set our parents up for success by providing a parent teachers kit which includes our core books; math manipulatives; exemplars for primary and secondary colors, print numbers to 20, the alphabet; plus construction paper, markers, scissors, glue, unifix cube, and stringing materials.