After all that tireless planning and prepping in August, the school year is finally underway! You’ve set up your classroom, made your plans, and welcomed bright new students into the learning space. But every year, teachers have more than just a class of new students to welcome – they also have a whole bunch of new families cheering those students on from behind the scenes.
Knowing where to start when it comes to families can be tricky, but we’re here to make it simple with three things to think about when building that bridge between home and school.
Create a Reliable Way to Communicate Learning with Families
I know I can’t be alone. Every year I would have families telling me that they wish they knew what was going on at school, but the classic response when asking their child, “What’d you do at school today?” was “Uh…nothing.” Students work hard at school all day, and that hard work should be communicated to families!
Families need a reliable, accessible way to see and understand what is happening in the classroom – and this doesn’t have to be fancy or complicated for you as the teacher! Effective communication is consistent and reliable, not over-the-top or delivered with confetti.
- Consider how you will communicate with families. Sometimes a weekly email may be best, but a physical newsletter encapsulating the week’s learning can support families as well. You may also consider recording videos to help demonstrate something you need parents to complete, or demonstrating how to access an important school resource.
- Engage students in this work! Having students co-write the family newsletter with interactive or shared writing means that they get to have ownership over what their families are seeing and hearing about their learning. This also supports students in talking about their learning with their families, helping them have more to say when asked “So what’d you do at school today?”
- Above all, consider access for families. Just like we need to connect to all students, our job as teachers is to connect to all families, not just the families that are easiest to reach or seem the most engaged in August. Some families may need multiple forms of communication, communication in their home language, or an in-person meeting to feel like part of the classroom community.
Support Learning in the Home Environment
Bridging between the home environment and school means giving families tangible opportunities to engage with what students are learning! Giving families concrete, actionable ideas to implement at home is a great way to build family engagement.
- Show families easy ways to write with their students. Tools like Post-It notes and colored pens can make writing engaging at home! Ideas like writing out the weekly schedule for the family, creating shopping lists, and crafting letters or even text messages to loved ones can help writing practice feel more doable at home for busy families.
- Make reading before bed purposeful. For caregivers of emerging readers, have them model reading with fluency, pointing out how punctuation guides their voice. For readers of more complex text, coach families to read pages back and forth, or even simply read alongside their children, modeling what being a reader might look like. You can also send home a weekly comprehension focus for their reading, like making predictions, analyzing character feelings, or connecting the text to real-world events or experiences.
Bring Families into the Classroom
Family engagement in the classroom doesn’t just happen outside of school hours. Building that two-way bridge between home and school means educators need to bring students’ families into the classroom – BUT this does not always mean physical, in-person volunteering! Engagement is not the same as direct involvement! Though having families in the physical space of the classroom can be a beautiful way of building community, we know that many families do not always have the opportunity or flexibility to be available during school hours. However, in the same way we want to see school learning reflected in a child’s home environment, a child’s home and family can be reflected in the classroom environment.
- Bring in family pictures or artifacts to be displayed in the classroom! Seeing themselves and their families reflected in the classroom can build trust with new students, especially at the beginning of the year. These photos can also support students in generating ideas for writing and storytelling.
- Choose high-quality, culturally relevant books as read-alouds, making sure that you are reading texts that serve as both windows and mirrors for the students sitting in your classroom. Students need to see and feel that their identities are accepted and affirmed in the classroom space and that who they are outside of the classroom with their families is the same as who they are inside the school walls.
- Involve families and caregivers as honored stakeholders in their child’s learning experience. Get family input on celebrations within the classroom, invite caregivers to speak about their work or passions with students in ways that support the current unit of study, and communicate opportunities to come into the classroom well ahead of time to give caregivers time to work events into their schedules.
Families and educators are partners, working toward the common goal of student learning and success. We’d love to see how you implemented some of these ideas into your work with families! Tag us to share your success with family engagement on Instagram or Facebook so that we can feature you in an upcoming story. Teaching and learning is a community effort!
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