Wondering Wednesday! Family engagement
In my latest reading we read on different strategies to use to engage families of elementary school children, they ended the module with this question.
List and describe three strategies found in the readings that can support families in helping their children's learning in elementary school. What are the implications for your own actions, strategies, and/or practice?
The three strategies I would like to focus on and bring more into my teaching arsenal include guided teaching for parents of specific skills for their children (APTT), home visits, and purposeful, meaningful and consistent communication home with parents.
These three strategies were shown to be highly effective. It tears down that we versus them mentality and the whole idea that they should "know" what to do because it's elementary type school work. These strategies would be super helpful to me as a parent because my child is in French Immersion and I don't speak French fluently. So to be able to go to the school and do workshops based on the strategies they are teaching my kid with some key phrases in French to help my student would be awesome.
For my own practice as we are building our program with students with disabilities this can seem daunting, I could be phoning home each day after school for each student in my program, but building it into my schedule so that I make two to three calls each day will decrease the magnitude of this task.
I have begun sending newsletters and information letters home with parents as we enter into new topics of discussion and I feel that inviting parents in to have a module information night will help engage them more and we will see further parent involvement with our students.
The home visit one is one I would struggle the most with as my students are in high school, and due to the nature of their cognitive delays home visits could be incredible stressful or lead to develop a codependency, but I would love to set up workshops in the school or community to invite parents to to help them with various projects we are working on in the classroom.
Helping parents understand that any strategy we use with their child in my program will be beneficial to all their children so they don't think they always have to do something different would be significant as well. Setting up workshops at the beginning of the year for parents to come to, to learn strategies that we use in the classroom for their children whether for reading, self regulation or life skills would obviously be beneficial for those parents that struggle not knowing what to do or how to respond when their child comes home with a book that is completely outside their reading level.
List and describe three strategies found in the readings that can support families in helping their children's learning in elementary school. What are the implications for your own actions, strategies, and/or practice?
The three strategies I would like to focus on and bring more into my teaching arsenal include guided teaching for parents of specific skills for their children (APTT), home visits, and purposeful, meaningful and consistent communication home with parents.
These three strategies were shown to be highly effective. It tears down that we versus them mentality and the whole idea that they should "know" what to do because it's elementary type school work. These strategies would be super helpful to me as a parent because my child is in French Immersion and I don't speak French fluently. So to be able to go to the school and do workshops based on the strategies they are teaching my kid with some key phrases in French to help my student would be awesome.
For my own practice as we are building our program with students with disabilities this can seem daunting, I could be phoning home each day after school for each student in my program, but building it into my schedule so that I make two to three calls each day will decrease the magnitude of this task.
I have begun sending newsletters and information letters home with parents as we enter into new topics of discussion and I feel that inviting parents in to have a module information night will help engage them more and we will see further parent involvement with our students.
The home visit one is one I would struggle the most with as my students are in high school, and due to the nature of their cognitive delays home visits could be incredible stressful or lead to develop a codependency, but I would love to set up workshops in the school or community to invite parents to to help them with various projects we are working on in the classroom.
Helping parents understand that any strategy we use with their child in my program will be beneficial to all their children so they don't think they always have to do something different would be significant as well. Setting up workshops at the beginning of the year for parents to come to, to learn strategies that we use in the classroom for their children whether for reading, self regulation or life skills would obviously be beneficial for those parents that struggle not knowing what to do or how to respond when their child comes home with a book that is completely outside their reading level.
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