Building Community During the Holidays
Delivering resources is one of Flyer’s main tenets to family engagement. We compiled three useful ways school use their Flyer School App to deliver resources that will help spread joy this Holiday Season. This content is great to be hosted in your resources tab, sent as push notifications, and displayed as banners!
TOYS & CLOTHING
The holidays can be an economically challenging time for many low-income families. Working together, we can make this time brighter for those families and their children.
Every winter, Slavens Elementary in Denver continues a tradition of “adopting” families at a sister school nearby. As a community, they work to provide these families with both gifts as well as things that they need (like winter coats and shoes), using their app to host a sign up form for various Christmas items. The Slavens family is building community with their sister school, and in the process, reinforcing the true spirit of the holidays ( giving, gratitude, and solidarity) with their children.
UTILITIES & HEALTH
As the temperatures are dropping, many families in our schools are growing increasingly more apprehensive about maintaining a warm, safe, and healthy home for their children.
LIHEAP helps identify local resources to help keep families in their homes, and maintain a healthy temperature indoors. Local Weatherization Assistance Programs (WAP) aim to help families permanently lower their utility bills by working to proactively make homes more energy efficient.
Socioeconomic factors greatly influence the volume of illness and disease, and prevent major barriers to vaccination efforts, especially during the winter flu season. Many low income families are juggling multiple jobs and cannot afford to take time off work to get vaccinated (or to stay home when they get sick). It is also common that low income and ELL families do not understand how to access flu shots, don’t recognize the importance of getting a vaccine every year, or do not trust immunizations. Children are especially vulnerable.
Salida del Sol (Greeley) worked to make flu vaccinations seamless and accessible for their families. By partnering with a local health organization, they were able to host a Flu Shot Clinic right at their school, enabling their students to get vaccinated and thus mitigate the spread of disease for the entire community.
BOOKS & PODCASTS
Whether your families are settling in for the holidays at home, or packing your suitcases to visit loved ones, Christmas break is an incredible opportunity to expand horizons, encourage critical thinking, and foster strong engagement with reading.
Fontenelle Elementary (Omaha) has partnered with DIBS for Kids, which aims to put a book in the hands of new readers, every night, at home, for fun. Gust Elementary (Denver) has built in an entire tab in their app dedicated to reading, with a vast selection of books, including narration in 15 different languages! of some of our favorite e-books, audiobooks, and podcasts for children of all ages to excite young learners (and their parents! And the Flyer team!) during the holiday break.
Originally published at https://www.flyerconnect.org on December 13, 2017.
