The children came to Morgan’s Wonderland to play. They left with more words and expressions to describe the experience.
On an early summer morning, school buses lined up outside the Tortuga Bay Pavilion at Morgan’s Wonderland. From each bus emerged mothers and infants. Some moms carried babies or held hands with wobbly toddlers. Other moms pushed their kids in baby strollers.
The field trip was sponsored by Northside Independent School District’s Even Start, a family literacy program that helps parents and young children build literacy skills together through early childhood education, adult education and family learning activities.
The program's approach is simple: teach parents how to turn ordinary experiences into opportunities for conversation, then give them places and experiences where they can practice those skills with their children.
On this day, the mothers, grandmothers or other caregivers attended not just to play games but to talk.
In this space, teachers in the program modeled strategies that parents used while exploring the grounds of the inclusive amusement park. It became a space where parents could ask open-ended questions, introduce new vocabulary words, ask children to describe what they noticed, predict an outcome or make an observation. Children even had the chance to lead conversations or connect experiences to everyday life.
In these sorts of outings, literacy becomes something that teachers or caregivers can demonstrate in authentic moments while children are engaged, attentive and curious.
Even Start Family Literacy field trips
Brenda Faz-Villarreal is the coordinator of the Even Start Family Literacy program. She explained that while the mothers and young children in the program have home visits and also attend classes, field trips are an important part of the experience of helping children develop language.
“We modeled how to interact with your child, how to … use the oral language, speak to them," said Faz-Villarreal. “So now you’re going to practice all this out here, talking to them in this environment.”
Faz-Villarreal said that introducing the mothers and children to experiences outside the home helps extend what the mothers learn about helping children develop their language.
“We know the importance of making sure our children have experience because that will help them, shape them … shape their future, and the experiences will help them … when they are interacting with other people in the world.”
For the parents in the program, these outings also help them develop their confidence as they move beyond their homes, classroom context and neighborhoods to develop their own language skills — and demonstrate that confidence and language competence to their children.
Adriana Sanchez is a family and community liaison for Even Start. She offered an example of a participating parent who demonstrated this confidence.
“Once I had a mom. She didn’t know how to read or write, but she was learning English. And towards the end of the school year, she was so excited. And she told me that she was now able to call and place a pizza order,” said Sanchez.
An example like this can move from quotidian interactions like ordering takeout to more serious ones.
“And so if there’s an emergency, they know that they can call 911 or do other things … or register a child for school or (write) down their immunization (information),” said Sanchez. “And so it may be pizza one day, but the next day, something really, really significant that could change everyone’s life.”
In other words, an outing like this becomes a kind of living classroom.
Maria Cumpian is one of the moms on this particular field trip. Her son Romeo is 2 years old.
“I love this program,” she said. “It’s very good. My English is better right now. The parent classes — I love them.”
The goal is not to teach the children to read on the spot but to give them experiences that could help build the vocabulary, conversational skills and background knowledge that support reading.
Much of the coaching that families receive during the outing mirrors what happens during home visits, where parents are encouraged to notice everyday opportunities to talk, ask questions, introduce new words and respond to their children’s cues.
But being somewhere new offers a different set of experiences to build on. At Morgan’s Wonderland, children encounter unfamiliar sights, sounds and activities, giving parents new opportunities to name things, describe what is happening, answer questions and encourage their children to explore through conversation.
These small exchanges are part of what researchers call “serve and return” — the back-and-forth interaction between a child and an adult that helps build language and communication skills.
Yu Chen is a postdoctoral fellow at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. Some of her research focuses on how children’s early experiences can shape their readiness for school and how home environments, including the quality of early relationships and the ways parents engage with their children, affect language and cognitive development.
Chen said that there are a lot of benefits for children to develop language skills when moms or other caregivers can take them outside the routines and familiarity of the home.
“The most important thing is that they get something new,” said Chen. “When they get novel experiences … children just get very excited and interested."
This kind of interaction becomes important for the parent, too.
“There are opportunities for parents to respond and then teach the kids something new that they wouldn’t necessarily see at home. And also, when kids are interested in those new things, they also pay more attention during their conversations with parents.”
That extra attention, says Chen, is important as it helps the child absorb information more readily. In an outing, the parent can engage the child in abstract ideas, explanations, even hypotheses.
This sort of “decontextualized talk,” said Chen, is helpful for those children who are developing language and literacy. An outing like the trip to Morgan’s offers a parent a chance to step in to guide the child through new experiences.
“So when they experience something like (Morgan’s) Wonderland … those opportunities create an environment that they may be talking about things that are more abstract as compared to the things that they see every day in their home.”
A parent’s strongest language can be a literacy tool
If a parent’s first language is not English, a child can still master this second family language. Skills children develop in one language — including vocabulary, storytelling, listening and understanding how language works — can provide a foundation for learning another. Researchers refer to this as cross-linguistic transfer.
Chen explained that research shows something surprising and counterintuitive, that holds true, nonetheless. And that is that children who grow up in, for example, Spanish-speaking families have linguistic skills that support learning English.
“There is this concept we call 'cross-linguistic transfer,' and there is a decent amount of research showing that kids who know more words in Spanish skills actually support their English (language) learning.”
The implications of this are positive for the classroom setting.
“When we look at elementary school kids when they have better reading comprehension in Spanish,” they also have better reading comprehension in English,” said Chen.
Resources shape opportunities
Even when parents are willing to help their children learn, families do not all have the same resources. Some have books at home, reliable internet, transportation and flexible schedules. Others may be balancing work, childcare, transportation challenges or limited access to educational materials.
"The resource inequalities are definitely one of the biggest barriers," said Chen.
Those differences matter because family literacy extends beyond the classroom. A teacher can show a parent how to turn a trip to the grocery store into a vocabulary lesson, but families need the time and opportunity to make those interactions happen. Access to books and new experiences also varies.
The challenge is ensuring those opportunities aren’t limited by a family’s existing resources.
Culture matters, too
There is also the question of whether a literacy strategy fits the family using it.
Chen finds that programs must be prepared to align with the needs and values of the families they serve.
Parents bring their own experiences, traditions, expectations and ways of communicating to their interactions with their children. What looks like an ideal conversation to a teacher may not look the same in every household.
That means family literacy programs have to adapt.
“I think if we are able to create an environment that is welcoming to the specific families that we want to support and we want to engage, it will help them feel more comfortable and confident,” said Chen.
Hillary Tobar is originally from Coahuila, Mexico. She has five children. The youngest ones are benefitting from the Even Start program and even teaching the older siblings what they’ve learned.
But the progress is also largely due to their mother, who, despite being new in the country and admitting to being shy and self-conscious, found her way to Even Start.
“Now I try more, obviously,” said Tobar. “And obviously, I don’t know some words, but I try more.”
The lesson of the Morgan's Wonderland outing is that early literacy doesn't require a special classroom or even an English-speaking parent. It can begin wherever a parent and child are together — as long as there is something to notice, something to talk about and time to take turns.
This story is part of a Texas Public Radio series examining family literacy as a potential solution to San Antonio’s literacy challenges. Through the experiences of families, educators and local organizations, the reporting examines effective interventions, barriers to access and a closer look at programs showing promise for improving literacy outcomes across generations. Learn more at tpr.org/literacy
Support for the series comes from the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.
Five resources for families with children 0-3
- ZERO TO THREE: “What Is Early Literacy?”: Learn about how early literacy begins at birth and about serve-and-return interactions, everyday conversation, following a child’s interests and introducing new words. They also promote the idea that early literacy is not the same as teaching a baby to read.
- San Antonio Public Library: Little Read Wagon: A great San Antonio resource. Little Read Wagon provides early-literacy information and materials to parents, caregivers and families with children from birth to age 5. The library also offers early-literacy programming in community settings, including parks.
- Reading Rockets: Family Literacy Activities: Read about simple activities parents can do with children to build vocabulary, comprehension, language and other literacy skills. The resources are available in English and Spanish.
- Reading Rockets: Talking and Listening — Practical Ideas for Parents: It’s important to remember that “talking is literacy.” Read about how listening and conversation help children learn words, ask questions and understand the world — and gives parents concrete things to do beginning in infancy.
- Reading Rockets: Bilingual Families: This is for parents who are still learning English and how they can support their children's literacy. You can also read about resources in Spanish.
If you have information about a group or other initiative promoting family literacy, email us at letters@tpr.org.
