I was looking through the California Department of Education website to see their parent engagement resources, and found that they had “Parent Handbooks” for each class content area. Each one is full of ideas about how parents can help their children learn more in those specific content areas (Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, Math).
It got me thinking — wouldn’t it be nice if there were “Teacher Handbooks For Parent Engagement” for those same content areas that listed ideas on how teachers could involve parents in classroom lessons? I shared a few ideas in my parent engagement book, and have mentioned some in my parent engagement blog, but not in any kind of systematic way.
So, I’ve got two requests:
1. If you know of any guides that share those kinds of ideas, please let me know.
2. Please leave a comment with any lessons that you’ve done that has included a parent engagement component. I’ll put them all in a list and post them later this summer.
Hi Larry,
Huge fan of yours – keep up the good work.
As a new teacher, I am always looking for ways to engage parents, particularly in my urban district. For the NCTE National Day of Writing (October 20), I had my students post either their poem or short narrative on the gallery of writing website: (http://galleryofwriting.org/). I sent out a press release to the local papers and sent letters home to parents and fellow teachers inviting them to read our “Perfect Day” stories.
I heard from a few parents at conferences that they enjoyed reading the students’ stories. I plan to do something similar for the next National Day on Writing, but I might explore other media or communication outlets.
Hi Larry,
I like your style and follow you on Twitter. I sell an innovative keyboarding method that splits the keyboard in two and students use a simple Home row sentence and five up and down association words for each side to learn the whole keyboard.
Two key pages with all the association words are used by parents at home and all teachers involved with the students to prompt a child who forgets a key or revise the method in a 5-minute mini-lesson at the start of class or at the kitchen table. Parents love being involved in their child learning to keyboard and, quite often, learn themselves