The family backpack project: Responding to dual-language texts through family journals

Rowe, D. & Fain, J.G. (2013). The family backpack project: Responding to dual-language texts through family journals. Language Arts, 90 (6), 402-410.


Family literacy practices play an important role in children’s literacy development. In populations where the family’s language and culture are different from the school’s language and culture, and where poverty may be another factor, it can be challenging to find the best ways to support family literacy. As an educator who is contemplating a project that would put books and family-friendly literacy activities into the homes of young children, I have struggled with most of the issues Rowe and Fain outline here in the description of their “family backpacks” project. Reading about how they approached these issues has been most helpful, and will guide me as I plan my own project.

Rowe and Fain describe a project which involved sending preschool children home with backpacks containing carefully selected children’s books and a “family response journal” for writing and/or drawing the family’s responses to the books. In cases where the family did not speak English at home, translations of books into the home language were provided, as well as audio recordings in both the home language and in English. The audio recordings are important for families where adults might not have strong reading skills, even in the home language. The point is that adults and children sharing books together is powerful, even if the adults do not speak the language of school, and even if the adults cannot read. There is still power in the interaction around books, and in the family relationships, that even the best school environment cannot duplicate.

Respect for families’ “funds of knowledge” and their existing literacy practices was evident throughout the description of the project, and this impressed me, as I am determined that my own project includes the same level of respect for families and what they mean for children’s literacy development. The “family response journals” described here allowed families to draw, write, or respond in any way they chose to the books in the backpacks. Examples of journal pages are shown in the article, and we can see that both adults and children responded to the books in a variety of ways. No matter what kind of response was made, though, engagement was evident, and that is important. It would be easy to try to mold family literacy activities in the image of school activities, but that would be a mistake, and would not produce the level of family engagement that can make a difference in children’s literacy development.

One big challenge of a project like this is book selection. Finding bilingual books is difficult, as Rowe and Fain report, and as I have discovered. There is a small body of available books in English and Spanish, but when it comes to other languages, finding such books is almost impossible. Here, the researchers resorted to having translations made specially, a good idea but probably extremely expensive. This project had funding from an Early Reading First grant from the U.S. Department of Education, which obviously would help. I did appreciate the sidebar on selecting books for multilingual learners and their families, and will use it when selecting books for my project.

This was a useful article for anyone planning a family literacy project, especially one that hopes to reach a linguistically diverse population.