This project operates on the premise that, as research has shown, involvement of families in their children s education is the key to a successful program. Each participating teacher identifies five to seven students who do not have multimedia computers at home and would benefit from additional use of a computer. The families of these students are given the opportunity to borrow the classroom computers for weekends, vacations and holidays. Families are required to attend one training session. For families that already own computers, a software borrowing program allows them to try out software that children are using in their classrooms or that appears to be engaging and educational.
Families borrow the software, books, manipulative and activity guides for three weeks.
At the early childhood level, we decided to structure the computer borrowing program with a focus on literacy. Emergent literacy is a term that has evolved over the last ten years and describes what is developing in children before they read and write that leads to literacy. Researchers explored why some children were coming to kindergarten knowing how to read and write by examining how those families and homes were different from those children coming to kindergarten with limited skills or without those skills. We know now that just as children crawl before they walk and babble before they talk, so to are they developing all kinds of skills and ideas about print before they read and write. Literacy involves the interrelatedness of reading and writing.