In my twenty years of experience in the classroom and my knowledge outside of the school assisting students with improving their reading skills, I've observed that parents play a crucial role. The students with the highest reading comprehension and literacy skills (Literacy skills include writing and oral communication) have in common parents who enjoyed reading and modeled the ability at the earliest age of the child.

At the earliest stage of cognitive development of a child, the parents read daily to their child. In research studies, reading to a child for thirty minutes each day has demonstrably improved a child's ability to acquire valuable language and verbal skills. Research is clear that a child that reads at home uninterrupted for thirty minutes each day increases their comprehension skills by one academic year over their peers who spend little time reading. What is interesting is most of the studies indicate it doesn’t matter what the child is reading (comic book, newspaper, magazine, book) as long as the time is structured and uninterrupted. Parents who want to accelerate a child’s literacy ability should make this a habit before the child’s bedtime. The same parents read and engage their child with oral questioning at the end of the story. The extra engagement provided young children an opportunity to express their thoughts about a story increasing language acquisition resulting in increased comprehension. It also affects sleep patterns positively in comparison to watching television, tablet, or computer play which has medically been shown to harm sleep.

Parents who at early ages begin teaching their children alphabetic characters and base words improve the literacy skills of children geometrically. A straightforward technique is to post pictures of everyday items throughout the home and the words associated with the image. In the simplest terms, we associate words with pictures. The critical element is vocabulary acquisition which is reinforced by the image, the word, and by oral expression of the word.

The classroom is a different environment than a child's home which seems rather obvious, but there has been a recent trend to make no distinction between the two. The classroom is the place where the skills are introduced and the home where literacy skills are reinforced. As harsh as this may sound unless a teacher and a parent are working as a team too often the lessons based on a sound assessment by teachers can be undermined by parents. Parents have good intentions, but sometimes unintentionally they confuse early readers with unscientific or unsound literacy teaching. For example, until a student acquires the foundational reading skills of letter recognition, sight words, rudimentary spelling, and phonemic comprehension research demonstrates placing a student on a computer or a tablet for more than one hour per day does little to improve or may harm a child's reading ability. Brain development is a tricky thing, and science is just now learning how neural pathways are reorganized by overuse of technology.

The role teachers play is to provide structured, evidence-based instructional activities that encourage students to read and to ask questions. The role of parents is to reinforce the activities and to stay in constant contact sharing any informal observations they notice about their child's literacy ability.

Parental involvement with their child's literacy development plays a huge role in how well their child develops literacy skills.  Parents are the ones providing interaction, stressing reading, using the library or buying books,writing stories, and consulting with the teacher as to their child's progress.  Teachers can help with their own involvement as well as the parents.  Teachers are the ones who encourage children in school, teaching them to read and participate in the activities related to reading plus writing about events, thoughts or stories. Teachers can  increase parental participation by sending book bags home, by having the child read with the parent, by helping parents who are having trouble try new methods for them such as the child reading every other sentence or discussing with the child what is happening after reading two pages of a book. They also encourage children when they display writing activities which children have done.  All these help the child develop literacy.