Family Engagement in Early Childhood IDRA’s New Semillitas de
aprendizaje™ Cartitas Letters Home Series Laurie Posner, MPA
Updated July 2012 It is said that from the earliest hearths of
the world and the first impulse toward human language, we have
had stories. Grandparents, mothers, fathers and teachers pass
down tales to children, who, in turn, fashion stories from their
days. And that place where art meets necessity binds us across
generations. But in the formal context of the classroom, many
children have been excluded in one way or another from the
making and sharing of stories. U.S. government policy from the
time of the Indian Peace Commission (1868) and for a century
thereafter was to suppress Native American languages in Indian
boarding and day schools – languages the Commissioner of Indian
Affairs from 1885 to 1888 called “barbarous dialect[s]” (Reyner,
2010). By 1923, more than 30 states had passed laws mandating
English-only classroom instruction (Ovando, 2003). It would not
be until the mid- to l