Life's Whirlwind Adventures

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 ab...

I've decided that I want to keep my brain moving, and so each week I am going to come up with a question to which I want to find the answer.  This means I get to do some research into subject matter that I am interested in. I'm super excited about some of the questions I am going to answer, and hope you will be too.  I'm hoping to be able to figure out how to have guest bloggers as well so that they can add their own, thoughts, so friends that blog, I could be coming to you! For the first two posts I am actually going to answer questions from an online professional development course I am taking because I am half way through the course and I have answered some of their questions anyway. The course is offered from Harvard X on EdX online.  The course is titled Family Engagement, the reason it caught my eye is that I struggle with family engagement in my classroom and I was hoping to find some ways to strengthen my family engagement and build a better school community. ...