QUALITY STORYTENTS

A resource for family, early childhood and community literacy workers

Projects for Family Literacy Resources
Family Literacy Materials are created by project staff or volunteers and are distributed for in-home use. There is no on-going contact with recipient families to support the use of literacy resources in the home.

Family Literacy Professional Training and Resources
These are initiatives that provide training and resources to practitioners.

Resources for the General Public
These are public awareness activities that foster interest in developing literacy activities in the home, including national Family Literacy Day bookmarks or posters, television programs, and special interest articles and newspaper inserts such as Literacy Matters (Calamai, 1999).

Within this outline, Storytents are best described as Family Literacy Activities for the General Public. Storytents are voluntary social gatherings. No one comes, or sends their children, unless they want. Storytents provide books for, and reading to, children and families, two activities cited as important factors in supporting children's literacy development (Allington, 1997; Kropp, 1993; Trelease, 1989; Doake, 1988; Taylor& Strickland, 1986). No one is pressured to get a job, excel in school or even read more regularly as some kind of social payment for accessing this service. All that is asked of participants is that they not unreasonably inconvenience other participants. Beyond that, they are trusted to make of the program and of themselves whatever they think best. This, too, is a humanistic perspective.