Through this week I met with my team to discuss the research I found to support creating two way communication between parents and teacher in order to benefit student's academic acheivements. I discussed the action plan project and how we could use student planners to open communication. All 4 teachers were willing to give it a try. I typed up the letter to explain to parents what we were creating and included an activity for the parents to do with their children. The planners went home wednesday and most came back on Friday. The comments from parents, overall, were positive! They appreciated the insight to what their students were learning and having the opportunity to work with their children. The planners that came back with no comment we will use as indicators of parents we could contact. We will take a look at this students and their academic progress.
As a team we discussed the possibility of those parents who would consider this a tool to try to dictate exactly what should be taught. I only had one parent who wrote a lengthy comment to inform me the activity was too easy and her child was bored. She questioned if differientiation was happening in the classroom and if the high students were being challenged. I took this as good constructive criticism and evaluated my classroom, and her child's scores. Her student is high, but struggles to put into context how to use the computations she learns in class. I will be contacting this parent for a conference to welcome her input, and give her evidence of her student's learning.
Overall, this first week has been a great eye opener of parents and teachers. We were made aware of a few students who, when given the activity to do at home, did not do as well as they do in the classroom, and on the flip side, we had other students shine. The bottom line is we had parents actively involved with helping the students with specific learning outside of a simple homework worksheet.
In the next few weeks I will be meeting with Administration, my team and selected parents to discuss and plan activities outside of the classroom that will involve local business in the academics of our students.
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That sounds great. I teach 1st grade and we send planners home daily to let parents know about homework and what not. What kind of info are you sending home?
ReplyDeleteInstead of having students fill in homework on specific days like the planners are intended for, we created an information letter explaning our desire to set up communication with parents along with a brief explanation of the research that led us to try this activity. We then gave the parents an activity of having their child draw a place value chart, label it, and put a number in the chart. With that we gave leading questions for the parents to ask to assess their students knowledge of the difference between "place" and "value." We also gave a reminder of the reading think tac to that was due next week and asking them to have their child give them a 2 minute presentation over the book they have been reading.
ReplyDeleteI didn't include that the letter was placed on the left side of the spiral which covered "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday." rParents are then encourage to respond on the right side of the spiral in the "Thursday/Friday" columns to tell us how their child did with the activities. They are given 2 days to complete the activity.
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