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What experiments/projects or research can I incorporate into my curriculum to engage more parent involvement?
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Hello Kim,
Parent involvement can be a challenging task. One way you may be able to incoorporate parent involvement is by asking for parent volunteers to help with experiements or projects in the classroom. This is a way to share with parents what their child is doing in the classroom while also getting them engaged in their child's learning. I also think it is important to take into consideration parents jobs. Each parent may be able to come in and share something with the class that could be benifical to their learning and it could apply to the curriculum. If a parent was in the medical profession it would be easy to relate it to a science standard. The parent, with any profession, could dicuss how they use math, reading, and writing throughout their work day to demostrate how important each subject is.
I hope this gives you some ideas!
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Hi Kim!
My name is Annie Mast and I am currently a third-year elementary education major. I feel that parent involvement can be very useful to help develop a deeper love and understanding of science concepts. One way that I would try to incorporate parent involvement is by inviting parents into the classroom to help with different experiments and activities in the classroom. Inviting parents into your classroom will help them understand what is going on and the different ways they could help their students at home. Another way to incorporate parents is through their careers. You could have parents with certain careers come in and explain how they use a certain science concept in their daily lives.
I hope this helps!
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Hello Kim,
I think that parent engagement in so hard everyone has such busy lives. It is hard for parents to have the time to do the activities you send home. One way that you could implement parent engagement into homes is to encourage students to ask one question about the world. They would think about a question that would be interesting to them (EX. where do we get our apples from?). Then encourage the parents to explain or play a video over that topic. Let the parents know that they don’t have to know answer to the question that they can learn with their child. Also, don’t let them take the easy way out (EX. we get apples from the store). Then once back at school have students explain what they learned about with their parents. You can also encourage parent to share their kids question with you. This could help the class to explore a question deeper. Young children are very curious this is a simple way for them to explore what they are curious about.
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I agree with this statement on parental involvement being different for everyone. Lot's of factors can contribute to the lack of or increase in parental enviornment. Culture, enviornment, socio-economic status are just a few of those factors. It is important to not judge a family with bias or pre-exisiting connotations on why or why not a parent is more involved. With that being said, I still think it is important to advocate fully for the student's success in the classroom. Provide suggestions and resources to the family for tutoring, remediation materials, online resources like Kahn academy or BrainPop. This can encoruage the students to work more one on one with their child and provide more opportunities for a diversified learning tatic.
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I think the best way to engage parents in the classroom is to create an environment that is secure for parents. Start the beginning of the year welcoming your parents and requesting volunteers. Once you know where your parents are comfortable helping, you can tailor your requests to meet their interest and comfort level!
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This is a topic I am very interested in, seeing that I will hopefully have my own classroom this time next year. I have been in three placements so far, therefore I have seen varying degrees of parent involvement. In two of these placements, I have seen the utilization of Class Dojo. I think this seems like a really great tool to keep parents in the loop of what is going on in the classroom and with their own child. Kids, especially of the younger ages, tend to forget to inform their parents of certain things, lose papers, etc., so having a forum where a teacher can directly contact parents and keep them in the loop is amazing. I intend to use this app, or one similar to it, to keep my parents 'in-the-know' with what is going on in my classroom. If you haven't tried this resource, I would definitely give it a try! If you have, let me know what you think!
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Hi!
I am an elementary education major myself. From what I have seen from where I have been placed at is taht parent involvement starts at day 1. By making it a welcoming an open enviroment for your parents can help increase their level of involvement a ton. Ask for volunteer's, if the covid guidleines let you! This bring parents, grandparent, etc into your classroom. They are not only there to help but they also get to see you teach theirn child. This brings an immense amount of trust and support from parents. Another thing you could do is us apps or technology that the parents can check daily while their child is at school. I know where I am placed now we use an app called Seesaw. It is an app to post and message parents, directly or all together. We have used this during the holiday's if we are working on a project. We send parenst pictures of their child working hard or showing off they're work. This does nothing but build good rapport and relationships with familes of your students. This leads to them being involved in their child's education and possibly going that extra mile at home.
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Hello Kim! I am always interested in new ways to get parents involved in their student's education. I recently read an NSTA article called, 'Science Packs' that provided a new idea for me to involve parents. The article is about creating take-home STEM backpacks for the students to take every weekend. The teachers got together and created mini STEM lessons and the school provided those materials. Each weekend they sent home the new lesson/materials in the backpacks for the students to participate in with their families. I thought this was a wonderful idea becasue that parents did not have to spend their own money or give up time that they don't have; they don't even have to leave their house. I would recommend checking out this article. There are plenty of ways to get parents involved, one important thing is to know your crowd. Get to know your parents and understand what worked one year may not always work the next! I hope this helped! Good luck!
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Hi! I always think it can be challenging to involve parents in their student's education as well. There is an article on here called 'Science Packs' and it is a take home STEM backpack that students will take home to complete with their families. All of the materials are included in the backpack so parents do not need to make additonal purchases for their child to complete an assignment. This is a great way for students to engage with their families and they can teach each other science concepts that they themselves may also be unfamiliar with. I recommend taking a look at this article because it had lots of good resoruces and infomation embedded in it.
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Hi Kim! A great way to get parents involved is by sending out weekly emails to them! Within the email, it can be a weekly newsletter stating everything that you will be teaching for the week and if there is anything happening in school. For example, if your school is having a spirit week include what the students should wear each day! Another thing to get parents involved is calling them personally to give an update on their child's week. Whether it be good or bad because they like to know what their children are doing within the class. Hope this helps!!:)
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Hello! I feel this is often a struggle alot of teachers deal with in a sense that they feel the parents are not as involved with what their child is learning at school. My CT sends out weekly news letters to inform the families of the students what we are learning about during that particular week. This allows the parents to know if their child is struggling with homework, the parents are able to know how to assist their child. My CT includes any important events or activities the students will be partaking in that week along with important dates relating to school closure, etc. If there are issues with an individual student my CT has taught me that it is best to email the parents directly and fill them in on this issues so they are aware. Parent involvement is extremely important at any age of students. Hope this helps!
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With parent involvement wanting to be incorporated, I suggest trying to have their child bring and talk about topics so the parents can incorporate the topic in everyday life.
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