Turning the Page Community Nights consist of educational parent workshops, literacy-based child mentoring activities, book giveaways for families’ home libraries, and a free, healthy family dinner. Community Night workshops for parents are based on challenges in navigating education systems, parent-teacher relationships, at-home learning, and other topics TTP has seen a need for over the years.
Community Night workshops for parents of early learners focus on the foundations of reading, including tips on how to build vocabulary, track reading progress, and the importance of reading aloud at home. TTP also helps parents instill an interest in STEM subjects in their children, with workshops introducing how math is taught in school, how technology is integrated into classroom learning, and how parents can extend learning in the home with easy-to-do math activities and science experiments.
Community Night workshops for middle school families center on college and career readiness, and provide parents with information and resources to support students as they explore interests, make important academic decisions, and take concrete steps on their path towards college or career readiness.
Child mentoring at Community Nights features fun, literacy-based activities for those children who accompany their parents to Community Nights. Child mentoring is broken up into groups based on grade level and each activity is carefully planned and led by TTP staff, volunteers, and local university students.
Our priority for this school year and beyond is to provide parents with as much support as possible as students transition back to in-person learning on a full-time basis and navigate the learning loss that may have occurred because of the pandemic. We seek to provide parents with concrete steps they can take to support learning in the home, collaborate with their children’s teachers, and identify supplemental community resources. We also look forward to our author and illustrator visits and conversations, as we know that parents will benefit from the creative ideas for engaging with their children generated during these events. We will be prepared to deliver these workshops in person in the school, or virtually, depending on the health and safety recommendations and policies in place.
Past evaluations of our programs have shown that 42% of TTP parents read daily at home with their children and 32% read to their children four to six days per week. The assessments of 70 kindergarten through third-grade students participating in TTP programs through a multi-year pilot program called NL READs were matched to their parents’ attendance to TTP events. After the second year of the initiative, tentative findings showed that second graders of Chicago parents who attended TTP events were outperforming their peers in the second grade and performing better than their peers in kindergarten and first grade. Data following the third year of the initiative found that TTP students in the third grade met NWEA growth benchmarks at a higher rate than their peers, with a rate of 70% compared to 46%.