https://padlet.com/anitabauer2/qa2oho2e9ooxkd91 Please, use the jam board for this week's CORP discussion en-us 2022-02-14 02:27:23 UTC 2025-10-27 15:59:44 UTC hello@padlet.com abigailsupalla https://padlet.com/anitabauer2/qa2oho2e9ooxkd91/wish/2061874938 Forming strong connections with families should be one of your top goals as a teacher. Parental involvement is key to a child's development because there is only so much teachers can contribute during the day, as the rest is left for the parents. When I think about family involvement, the scenario that first comes into my head are open houses. We could call it Family Fun Night and families can come to get an understanding of where their child is learning, how they are doing, and experience what it is like to learn in the classroom. Programs that have frequent family fun nights, or something similar to it, are giving the families a chance to attend at least family fun night and start to get comfortable with coming into the classroom. The fun night would be an open house for families to come and go whenever they pleased, and could stay as long as they wanted to. It would be a chance for the families to get to know one another and who their child is friends with, they will most likely form relationships. We would play fun games that teach lessons to be kind and compassionate, games that we are able to set achievable goals for the children and ourselves, and many games with social skills and other lessons. This Family Fun Night would be a potluck too, and a chance for families to share some of their family heritage or culture through food. Something that could be done differently to encourage more family involvement could be sending out a family newsletter or blog, emails, and flyers sent home with the students. The flyers will all be eye-appealing and shows all of the fun things we will be doing. This will hopefully make sure that every family at least is aware of the family fun night. We want families to feel welcomed into the class and having family fun nights would be a great way of including all families to come into our classroom. ]]> 2022-02-23 04:13:04 UTC https://padlet.com/anitabauer2/qa2oho2e9ooxkd91/wish/2061874938 katrienawalling https://padlet.com/anitabauer2/qa2oho2e9ooxkd91/wish/2063033301 Family inclusion in the classroom is so valuable in creating a safe and welcoming classroom. It can be a tricky thing to strive to be inclusive to every family in your program simply because every family is different and they might need support in different ways. 
One memory of family involvement in my past was when I worked for a program that supported refugee families from the Congo. This was an entirely new experience for me as a new teacher I had had no experience with working with families that spoke little to no English and had no experience with many "normal" American things. One thing that stands out in my memory was we had a new Swahili family that just joined our classroom. It was a day when we were asking parents to send in a cold lunch for students because we had planned to go on a picnic and eat our meal outside. But culturally in the African culture they don't typically eat a lunch instead they fast from their first meal of the day until the final meal before dark. This was a very hard thing that we had to try to communicate to this family and it was truthfully very hard from them to understand. To solve this problem we started by trying to use Swahili words to communicate what we were trying to say. We had created posters and visuals that coordinated Swahili and English words so that we could communicate. This didn't work well unfortunately. Our next step was to include a translator. The program that helped the refugees incorporated translators from the local university and we were able to use these helpful people to communicate what we needed to. 
This was a huge hurdle that we needed to get through with this family, while not isolating them because of a language barrier. I learned so much from this family (and the families that came after). If I could go back I would tell myself not to be intimidated by the language barrier and to challenge myself to talk to these families every single day with a smile on my face. Even though we couldn't understand each other all the time we were able to support each other with a positive attitude and a cheery demeanor. I learned so much about being inclusive, both in myself and in my classroom, from those families and I am so thankful for their patience while I learned how to navigate those hurdles. ]]> 2022-02-23 17:20:54 UTC https://padlet.com/anitabauer2/qa2oho2e9ooxkd91/wish/2063033301 christinaweidkamp https://padlet.com/anitabauer2/qa2oho2e9ooxkd91/wish/2063437768 I haven’t been working in a classroom long enough to have many scenarios of family involvement. At the program I work at parents aren’t super involved because their child is only at preschool for 3 hours a day. However, I do nanny full-time so one scenario that I can think of is when I first started nannying. I was watching a 7-year-old and his 8-month-old sister. He didn’t go to school because his mother wanted to homeschool him due to bad school experiences. I had the responsibility of homeschooling him while his parents were gone working. This became a challenge, and we weren’t making much progress. Having his sister around was a huge distraction and we dealt with tantrums on the daily. I tried making learning fun and sticking to a schedule to help him transition from being home to doing schoolwork. It got to the point where I didn’t know what to do because nothing I tried worked. I sat down with his mother one day and told her that I can’t keep homeschooling him because it is just not working. I told her that he would benefit from going to school and learning around other children. Talking it over went well and she understood what I was saying. She had tried to work with him a couple times and realized that homeschooling was not going to work for him. I wish I would’ve known how to support his challenges and behaviors so that I could’ve supported him better. If I could do it over again, I would start immediately with a routine. He would need to wake and get dressed as if he were going to school. I would have a schedule for the day, planned with developmentally appropriate activities. I would try to coordinate his schooling with his sister’s sleep schedule so that I could have a set time where I would be one-on-one with him. I would also want his parents to work with him more often than they did. I would want the parents to be more involved in his schooling than they originally were, and I now know how to include them in school so I would be able to achieve this goal easily. 

]]> 2022-02-23 21:41:32 UTC https://padlet.com/anitabauer2/qa2oho2e9ooxkd91/wish/2063437768