Building A Productive Home-School Connection
My mom is a teacher. Yes, at 83 years of age, she is still teaching in the classroom but now she does this virtually in a small town college.
I now realize I had the “insider’s” access to a productive home-school connection. Growing up in a small town and having a parent as a teacher meant everyone knew who you were and where you were. No skipping class for me as I found out the hard way in junior high.
As a teacher myself for the past 33 years, it has become obvious that there are many variables that can affect this connection.
When I first started my teaching career, I worked with preschool-aged children and their parents in my licensed day home. Parents would drop off and pick up their children from our back door. I had a bulletin board there where they would sign their child in and out for the day. I also posted a daily schedule of the activities and our whereabouts for the day.
Parents seemed to appreciate this quick reference information and were able to locate us any time of the day if they needed to pick up their child early. Communication was visual and verbal every day.
The formal school system does not afford this luxury. The majority of communication is digital, and teachers often do not “see” their students’ parents until parent teacher conferences.
There is a fine line between respecting personal time and professional time. Now that communication is mostly digital, some parents feel they can “communicate” with the teacher any time of day via an email or app.
Most teachers do appreciate this quick method of communication but many are hesitant to voice any concerns that they may have of the student in an email.
Face-to-face communication is the most effective method yet many parents do not even come close to the school during the day as their child either rides the bus or arrives from a before and after school care program.
Phone calls are a close second effective method of communication yet are limited to before and after school due to the instructional time commitments a teacher must adhere to.
A proven effective form of communication that I have been using in my classroom for the past 15 years is a shared Google slide presentation that is emailed to the parents at the beginning of the year and includes:
Updates of weekly events and activities
The student’s evidence of learning
Home literacy and numeracy expectations
Parents can comment on the document and I receive an email to alert me of the new communication. Every year parents remark how simple and un-intrusive this form of communication is for them with everything they want or need to know in one place.
The literacy expectations provide a link to another Google slide presentation of their child’s sight word practice. These sight words are offered with audio and visual components to help both child and parent decode each unfamiliar word. There is also a link to a new digital reading book (scanned from my classroom hard copy library) to read together at home.
The numeracy expectations provide an interactive weekly math learning activity, complete with instructional videos, that spans the entire mathematics curriculum for the practice of concept and skill development at home.
Building a productive home-school connection is important to all. The learning activities found in our K-6 Learning Library are sure to help your child develop their math and ELAL skills at home!
Thank you for reading this blog post on building a productive home-school connection.
The lesson plans in our K-6 Learning Library will help you and your child or students right now and for years to come. The best part is you can edit these resources so that your child or students can focus on what they can do right now and build on it rather than internalize that they are not performing at grade level.