Editor’s Note:  This blog entry started as a ‘news’ post.  The more I read about the Raising Early Achievement in Literacy (REAL) Project, the more I realized that this is an excellent resource worth sharing with our pediatric and school based speech-language clinicians!

[Source:  Science Daily.com]
A unique approach to early literacy work with families where children develop their language skills and their ability to read and write from an early age has had a huge success.
Researchers from the University of Sheffield funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) initially planned to use the approach with around 60 families, but discovered that around 6,000 had actually benefited from their work.
Professor Cathy Nutbrown of the University of Sheffield, who led the project, shared her approach to family literacy with Early Years practitioners including nursery workers, teachers, child-minders and family support units to help them plan and evaluate their family literacy work.
A report by the National Literacy Trust in May this year found that children in the UK are more likely to lack the basic reading and writing skills than children in Australia or Canada — even though the UK spends four per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on family benefits relating to children compared to 1.2 per cent in the USA and 1.4 per cent in Canada.
The Sheffield research team further developed the ‘ORIM Framework in the Raising Early Achievement in Literacy’ project in the late 1990s. The framework focuses on four key elements: opportunities, recognition, interaction and models (ORIM). The key to the framework is that it highlights parents’ roles and offers ideas for how they can help their child.
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