Family School Connection

I believe that the involvement of parents in the school community is very important. In my experience during the past 5 years, I have seen a positive correlation between the involvement of parents and students’ success academically and emotionally.

Communicating with parents will be a priority for me as a teacher. In my last placement of my student teaching, teachers had blogs where they would post everything that was going on in the classroom. This was the main way of communicating with parents and had positive responses from parents. In the school that I worked at in Mexico, teachers had class websites as well. Ideally, I would love to have this form of communication for my parents, where I would post things such as announcements, homework, newsletters, school calendar, lunch menu, photos of projects and events and much more (Connell, 2013). During open house where I get to meet all the parents, I would take advantage of this time to give out a survey to parents to see what is it that they would like me to include in the website and what is the best way to contact them, whether it is email, by phone, etc.

The amount of homework I will assign will depend on the school policies of the school that I work in as well as the community that I work in. I do not agree with the idea that elementary students should get a lot of homework, but I also think that having no homework at all is not the best way to go either. For me, homework is not for students to gain more knowledge about the content being taught in class. For me it is more about the idea of slowly teaching responsibility to children and for them to learn better study habits and management skills. “The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate homework, but to make it authentic, meaningful, and engaging (Darling-Hammond & Ifill-Lynch, 2006 from Terada, 2015). It’s all about balance. It is proven that elementary students are the least to benefit from homework rather than middle and high school students (Terada, 2015). So because of this, the idea of assigning the amount of reasonable homework depending on the grade level will be ideal.

Because literacy will be another priority in my classroom, I will incorporate parents and community in the literacy process. “Family members are usually the most readily available individuals in the child’s world to provide a model and scaffold for the child’s burgeoning literacy development” (Howat, 2006, p. 95). Because of this, I will have parents involved as much as possible. Ideally, I would like to have a writer’s and reader’s workshop in my classroom. The last stage of this model includes a celebration of the students’ writing. For this, I would invite parents to join us for them to get motivated in being involved in their child’s literacy process. I would also love to invite parents as guest readers, a tradition that we used to do in Mexico, where parents (or grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc) would sign up to come and read to their child’s class on Friday mornings. Not only did the students get excited, but parents get to be part of their child’s literacy process as well.

References:

Terada, Y. (2015). Research Trends: Why Homework Should be Balanced. Retrieved April 4, 2016 from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/research-trends-is-homework-effective-youki-terada

Connell, G. (2013). Create an Impressive Class Website in Under an Hour. Retrieved April 4, 2016 from http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/top-teaching/2013/06/create-impressive-class-website-under-hour

Howat, H. (2006). Maximizing Family Involvement in Early Literacy. Contemporary Issues in Communication Science and Disorders, 33, 93–100.