In an effort to engage students and parents in their home environment, educators from Elephant’s Fork Elementary School brought fun games and activities to Suffolk’s Parker Riddick public housing complex Wednesday.

Reading specialist Jenny Owens’ son Keaton, himself an Elephant’s Fork student, played the role of ticket collector, seated at a table just inside the front door.

“Alright, pay up!” he declared, before students handed over tickets and Keaton stamped the back of their hands to show they had paid to play.

Caren O’Conner, a reading specialist at Elephant’s Fork with Owens, who also helped run the project in Parker Riddick’s community center, said the outreach was linked to a rewards initiative at the school.

Shunning the stick approach, teachers have been rewarding students from all grade levels for positive behaviors with tickets. Students brought their tickets to Wednesday’s outreach to exchange them for the games and activities, while they’re also able to cash them in for goods at the school shop.

While the rewards system has been in place at Elephant’s Fork for several years, Owens said she started using it this year to encourage reading.

“They may get tickets for reading a certain number of books independently,” she said. “I’ve seen the number of books my students read just in the past month go up.”

It’s another incentive for them to learn, said O’Conner, who said she rewards students, for instance, for trying their hardest on a test.

“They want to do well,” O’Conner said.

The educators said it was the first time the school had visited the complex where many of its students live. They’d like to partner with churches to reach students who live in the downtown area, they added.

The Suffolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority supports the outreach, which the educators say will become a regular occurrence.

The authority’s residential services manager, Sylvia Copeland-Murphy, had firsthand experienced of something similar in New York, the Harlem Children’s Zone. “We have taken their method,” Copeland-Murphy said.

Other teachers at Parker Riddick Wednesday included Shiquitta Eley, who grew up in the complex and still has family living there.

“They need to see role models, especially ones that look like me,” Eley said. “I think if they see me come out doing something positive, that’s going to inspire them to do something positive.”

“These kids are definitely near and dear to our hearts,” Owens said.