PAL recognizes the importance of parents reading to their children, and “reading for enjoyment” workshops are held to give parents strategies. There are “Read to Me, Mom and Dad” workshops for parents of pre-school children, and “How to Make Your Child a Better Reader” workshops for parents of school children. In-services are held for teachers in understanding learning styles, and student profiles are developed and discussed with staff.

Children participating in the PAL Project are referred to the program by their school, their parents, or themselves. They meet with their tutor at the school during or after school hours, usually once a week for an hour and a half. The pair uses reading material selected by the student and prepared by the tutor based on student interest. Activities include learning reading strategies such as predicting, DRTA, language experience, phonetics, and many “hands-on” experiential activities.

Alpha Familiale à St-Paul (Family Literacy in St. Paul)
Alpha Familiale began in St. Paul in February 1995, a project of the Adult Literacy Program. The adult learners in the program asked the staff to implement a family literacy component so they could help their children and grandchildren with reading, comprehension, and writing skills. Alpha Familiale did not use any particular model for their program, but rather used the specific needs of participants as its basis. Adult learners have been and are involved in planning and developing the program.

The main goal of Alpha Familiale is to break the cycle of illiteracy among French families in the community. Other goals are to develop better communication between the parents and their children; to increase parents' knowledge in French in terms of reading, writing, and comprehension; and to generally increase interest in reading in French.

The group meets together for two hours one afternoon a week. (Because clientele are from a rural community, access is an important issue.) For the first hour, parents and children spend time reading together. The focus is on understanding the story, word comprehension, vocabulary extension, and building writing skills using story vocabulary. In the second hour, parents go to their literacy class while children work on homework with a tutor's assistance.