Amy Hyde
NLGL Creative Synthesis
May 2019
Family Involvement
Many families are not quite sure how to support their students at home. Their experiences in school were very different from those of their children today. Many parents who are reluctant to participate in their child's schooling had bad experiences themselves when they were in school and prefer to just stay away. It is our responsibility as teachers to invite families into the school and make them feel welcome. Tapping into parents' funds of knowledge to participate in their child's education allows them to feel welcome and valued in a school setting (Bean, 2015; Souto-Manning & Martell, 2016). Learn more about the importance of family engagement in addition to the importance of Reading, Writing, and Talk in a child's literacy education by watching the video below.
The Summer Slide is a real concern for students attending traditional calendar schools. After viewing the discrepancies in reading assessment data from the end of the last school year to the beginning of this school year, I started to think about how to engage families in summer reading to help reduce this discrepancy. Many families from lower socioeconomic households do not have transportation and often live very far away from the school. Offering transportation for families to get to school events makes a big difference. Another way to engage families is to bring the school into the community. This can be done in a variety of ways. Take a look at the information below to see a plan for creating an informal summer reading program in a community so that children have access to books through the summer and adults they can read with.