ACIRI: One sure way to know your early literacy program is working
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Try this free activity designed to promote one of the 12 behaviors: "Relating Content to Personal Experiences" ("Relacionando el Contenido con las Experiencias Personales") |
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If you tell a parent that incorporating certain strategies when reading with her child is bound to help the child do better in school, chances are that parent will want to learn more.
And, from your perspective, wouldn't you be glad to have a tool that not only pinpoints the strategies that will make interactive reading more effective, but also provides activities and measures progress to boot?
The program outlined in Andrea DeBruin-Parecki's Let's Read Together, featuring the Adult-Child Interactive Reading Inventory, makes that possible.
ACIRI is the first instrument to measure interactive behaviors between adult and child when reading together that research has shown lead to a child's later literacy success. Using the results of ACIRI to pinpoint which of 12 behaviors need attention, you supply fun activities designed to enhance the behaviors in question; activities are available in English and in Spanish on an accompanying CD-ROM. For program evaluation purposes, ACIRI can be used as a pretest and a posttest to demonstrate progress.
Easy to administer
1. Before you implement ACIRI, complete the preliminary information on the back of the tool; this information should not be filled out in front of the adult.
2. To ensure that the adult and the child feel comfortable, present ACIRI as a method for helping parents improve their interactive reading skills:
Today, I am going to watch you read with your child. I will be right behind you. I know you do wonderful things when you read, and I want to write down some of these things as well as others that can help your child become a successful reader. When you are done, I will share everything I have written.
When parents understand that incorporating certain behaviors will help young children gain skills that will lead them to become effective readers and succeed in school, they are strongly motivated to participate in the evaluation.
3. Offer a selection of books that you have chosen in advance to match the child's developmental level and the adult's reading level (a list of suggested books is provided).
4. Observe the adult and child reading together, noting their behaviors on the inventory.
5. To be able to give specific feedback afterward, make notations and use tick marks to indicate the frequency of desired behaviors:
If the adult is reading a book about a big dog going to the park with his friends, the child might say, I go to the park with my friends, too, and the adult might respond, Yes, I take you every Saturday morning. You could note: park, friends (C), Sat AM (A). This would remind you of what was said to show that both the adult and child related the book to personal experiences—one of the 12 recommended practices.
6. When the reading is complete, briefly study your comments and discuss them with the adult in a nonthreatening, helpful manner.
7. After the parent leaves, read over your comments and numerically score the behaviors privately, entering the scores on the back of the tool.
The numerical scores are used to help determine intervention activities and for program evaluation purposes only; they are not meant to be shared with participants.
