These Poems Were Written In A Poetry Program In An Eighth-grade English Classroom

By Author: Amandda
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"When You Do Your Best, There's Someone to Encourage You":
Adolescents' Views of Family Literacy
I'm thanking for my life
And my mother who treats me right
My special talents and the performing arts
My family and their loving hearts.
--Desiree

Mom loved me, pop hated me
Well anyway that's what 1 believe
Maybe aunts and uncles will help me out
Someday, maybe, seriously I Tag Heuer Replica doubt Mother was the one who put clothes on my back,
When no one else was there Brothers were the ones who tried to
Keep me on track When father was elsewhere
Here I am all alone
Walk and wondering with no place to go
Still wishing I could find a place to
Call home.
--LaDonna

These poems were written in a poetry program in an eighth-grade English classroom designed to create connections among families, community members, students, and teachers. There are compelling reasons to look for connections between adolescent students' families, the communities, and schooling ...
... experiences; adolescence is a time where children are straddling the world of being a child yet moving toward developing independence as a result of their own experiences and understandings of their life. There are two intertwined, sometimes competing, factors that complicate the topic of family literacy regarding adolescent students. First, adolescents' views of literacy reflect their personal and social development. Their interests revolve around their emerging sense of independence, emotional changes, reactions to social pressures, and need for peer acceptance (Feirsen, 1997). Second, family has an important and significant impact on children's development at any age, but it is particularly relevant during the adolescent years due to the issues they are engaging with as they become more autonomous. Unfortunately, there is a misperception that in developing their autonomy, they need less adult guidance and involvement. Yet, in reality the opposite is true because adolescents benefit from continued support and mentorship that is developmentally appropriate and relevant to their needs (DePlanty, Coulter-Kern, & Duchane, 2007).

Despite the fact that adolescents benefit from caring adults that participate in their education, involvement of families decreases incrementally as students' progress to higher grades. Adolescents often do not Tag Heuer Carrera Replica encourage their families to participate because they have become increasingly peer-oriented, more independent, and their relationships with their families lave changed in many ways (Hoover-Dempsey & handler, 1997; Walker, Wilkms, Dallaire, Sandier, & Hoover-Dempsey, 2005). Understanding factors that affect the parents' roles have been documented by research (Auerbach, 2007; Epstein, 1996), but there is very little research that describes how adolescent students perceive and affect their own families' involvement in their own words. In this article, I describe low adolescent students defined and affected family involvement within a poetry program which was developed and funded as a way to involve families in the school.