Hanen I’m Ready Program for Building Early Literacy in the Home Summary

Speech & Language Works was selected to participate in a pilot Hanen parent training program called Hanen I’m Ready Program for Building Early Literacy in the Home. We were one of 20 sites chosen to assist in the pilot. Participants were in Singapore, Australia, Germany, the United States, and Canada. The other sites in Alberta included La Biche, Vulcan, and Lethbridge. The Hanen I’m Ready Program for Building Early Literacy in the Home was designed to teach parents fun and practical strategies to work on the building blocks of literacy – vocabulary knowledge, understanding stories, print knowledge, sound awareness, and letter-sound knowledge.

The pilot consisted of 6 sessions that were 2 hours long. For the first hour of each session, parents learned Hanen strategies to enhance communication, learn new vocabulary, learn story structure concepts, and build knowledge about how print works. During this hour, the children were doing theme-based language activities with a Speech-Language Assistant (SLA). Once the parents learned about the strategies, practiced them with other parents, and made a plan to try it with their children, they joined the children to try the strategies. A Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) circulated the rooms to provide on-site, real-time coaching. After about 30 minutes, parents debriefed with the other parents and the SLP. The children ate a snack and had some time to free play with the other children in the group under the supervision and guidance of an SLA.

Five families participated in the six sessions held each week in October and November 2015. Topics included: turning book reading into a time to talk, making new words sparkle, helping your child understand the story, deepening your child’s understanding, building your child’s understanding of how print works, and building your child’s sound awareness.

It was wonderful to work with such an engaged group of parents. The Hanen I’m Ready Program for Building Early Literacy in the Home helped each parent look at how he or she was reading to his or her child and gave tips and purpose during reading to help grow the child’s language and literacy skills.

Nancy Bassendowski, M.A., R.SLP, S-LP(C), CCC-SLP