We have helped schools develop reading cafes with parents and carers.
Food is a great way to encourage children and parents/carers to relax around books. The café might serve milk and toast, jacket potatoes, soup & sandwiches or croissants, fruit and juice, but there are always lashings of books on the menu. Usually a café runs weekly, either at the beginning or end-slot of the school day, and children can invite any adult from home who knows them well to come to the café with them on a regular basis.
The adult and child settle down for 20 minutes whilst a team of ‘waiters’ (perhaps an older class) delivers food and beverages to all. The book chat can generate conversations that echo across the whole family. Children’s engagement with reading benefits hugely from the familiarity and shared experiences that adults who really know the child well bring to the book-reading. An added benefit can be if the older class prepare the food and document the café experiences (both their own and the younger children’s) using pictures and text, which gives the older children an enjoyable, low-stakes literacy activity to share with others.
It works best when the space and seating have been carefully considered and the café catering is well-planned and smoothly organized (either by an additional adult or as a project for an older class). It is essential that the children are well-prepared (bringing 3 possible books to the café to choose one to read with their parent/carer) and that the focus of the participants is completely on reading and sharing the book. This means that class teacher support to ensure a suitable supply of books and help choosing a readable book might be necessary. Also some parents/carers may benefit from advice about adopting a “shared reading” approach (where the adult and child take turns to read, so the story unfolds more quickly) or “pause prompt praise” techniques for when their child gets ‘stuck’ on a word.
Reading Cafe at Deerpark Primary, Clackmannanshire
The Reading Café with parents at Deerpark Primary School, Alloa, has been developed alongside the intergenerational reading mentoring programme ‘Help a Child Learn to Read’. A key part of work with Deerpark Primary has been to link with professional development work with teachers being carried out by literacy specialist Sue Ellis. The café was run by children from P7.
“Really good thing for the kids to do and the parents to be involved in and have fun and spend time with them in their school environment”
Kodie, parent
Developing a community-based approach
The schools we work with have different catchments and present different challenges in terms of the groups of parents needing support. Our projects have commenced following initial exploratory work and negotiation with each school. Devising the projects in a way that is able to target particular groups requires careful planning and sensitivity. This has established different ways of working within the schools and drawing from the overall theories of change presented below helped school and community staff orientate towards new ways of working.
Culture Cafe, Scotstoun / Whiteinch
The Culture Cafe at Scotstoun primary school supports a group ethnic minority of parents. This has been featured on the BBC The L.A.B. Scotland website.
What makes it work well?
- The café requires a strong focus on the books. Children need to have selected 3 books in advance (fiction, poetry, information, joke or ‘how to’ books) to bring so they can choose with their family member, which one to read together.
- The café requires a wider curriculum that does not stigmatize children around reading attainment, and that promotes engagement, interest and flexible responsive classroom environment and reading curriculum.
When does it fail to work?
- It is easy for food or intrusive ‘waiters’ to take over and distract either children or adults!