Home learning environments
Chapter 3: Home Visiting to Support Early Literacy Development
Chapter overview:
Home-visiting is at the core of many effective home learning projects with parents. This chapter focuses on home-visiting as a way of working with parents to help them support their young children’s learning. The chapter distinguishes between home-visiting, home learning and, what during the COVID-19 pandemic, was referred to as home schooling. We consider the effectiveness of home-visiting and provide of working with families in their own homes.
Chapter Objectives:
To define home-visiting, home learning and the COVID-19 pandemic view of ‘home schooling’;
To provide a rationale for using home-visiting to explore aspects of young children’s learning with parents;
To consider the approaches, attitudes and skills of home-visiting practitioners;
To highlight parents’ own experiences of educational home-visiting.
Further Reading
The REAL Online website provides a range of resources for organising work with parents and home visiting
http://www.real-online.group.shef.ac.uk/organising-with-parents.html
http://www.real-online.group.shef.ac.uk/home-learning-2022/
Brooker, L. (2002) Starting School : Young Children Learning Cultures, Buckingham : Open
A useful, thoughtful text focussing on the richness that children from many cultures, with different languages bring to their community, and identifying the role of settings in work with parents around transition to school.
Whyte, K. L. and Karabon, A. (2016) Transforming teacher–family relationships: shifting roles and perceptions of home visits through the Funds of Knowledge approach. Early Years. 36(2)207-221. DOI: 10.1080/09575146.2016.1139546
This paper explores teachers experiences of home visiting, and their changes in perception and power when teachers sought to learn from parents.