Chapter Five Reading and Writing

It appears that Williams is taking a critical look at parents participation in their children's education.  When children are small they are usually enthused to learn by imitation. Williams brings up an important topic (parents involvement in the children's education). I'm glad that Williams is addressing a critical period for children to develop communicative skills (reading, speaking in sentences, and comprehension). Williams gives a good example of when parents have a potential to help children to become successful in the educational system. He states, "Children are naturally very curious about their own names, and not long after making the connection between words and symbols they take great pleasure in seeing their name in writing" (Williams 152). What Williams is saying is, the parents' involvement is crucial to the success of childrens' education. The parents have the opportunity to expand childrens' vocabulary with different images/symbols, such as elephant, school building, etc. This type of connection can lead to forming sentences and so on. Then the children will be able to exhibit good/great communication skills when they get to kindergarten; its beneficial to the teachers. Teachers who have children in classes who have the fundamental skills are placed in a position to continue to enhance children's comprehension and writing skills. The main challenged that I find that teachers will confront is the "phonics", which I believe is an instrumental tool to help students (children) to become more comfortable with words as they learn to pronounce them (words). Therefore, phonics and whole-language are important skills to exercise. Reading and writing with computers will also motivate a child to learn and gain confidence with reading and writing. Students are able to do spell check, delete words, to write, and explore new words using technology, which includes them in how society communicates in the 21st century. However, I don't rule out making sure children read text from handbooks, learning cursive handwriting, writing on paper, and picking up a dictionary and learning words. It is not good to become to dependent on computers because it also exposes individuals to temptation - not being able to remember spelling, not learning how to use a library, and not able to have good handwriting.  Paper does seemed to have a connection to nature! It seems more intimate! Personal! Authentic!

I do have some concerns about parents involvement in children's education! How do you get parents to become involve in the childs' education, especially underpriviledge households? How do the education system enforce parents, single mothers or fathers or grandparents to become participants in their child's education? Should the community be confronted with this issue?