The Home-School Partnership File
Enhance your home-school partnerships with this one-stop resource by Mike Walton, offering all the resources you need to communicate with parents!
The Home-School Resource File is a brand new resource from Optimus Education designed to help you with the essential work of communicating with parents to develop successful home-school partnerships.
This new collection of materials is an offshoot of the termly publication, Working With Parents, which in the past contained a section comprising articles offering both information and advice to parents.
The Home School Resource File now brings together nearly a hundred of the best of these, re-edited, updated, sometimes combined, and re-organised, now blended together into a single collection of usable hand-outs, that can be kept in one place for easy reference and access.
The Home School Resource File will enable you to: • Improve your home school partnerships, offering benefits for you, your pupils and the school as a whole • Benefit from improved communication with parents who can play a key role as welcome visitors, interested parties, potential helpers, fundraisers, handy experts, informed partners, joint decision-makers, or model learners • Access all of the resources you need quickly and easily, saving you valuable time and ensuring vital communications aren’t missed • Empower other members of staff to participate in relationships with parents by having easy access to reproducible resources
All of the articles directly address the parents but the use of them will be in your hands. To make them even more manageable, all of the contents are also available in a Word version on an accompanying CD-Rom. This means they are easy to reproduce as many times as needed and can be adapted if need be to suit your own needs and circumstances.
Containing contributions from 27 writers, this collection splits the articles and handouts into three sections:
Section A: Information
- Key Issues explained
- Terminology clarified
- School practices explored
- Learning processes made clear
- Backgrounds provided
Section B: Advice
- Parents and starting school
- Parents and school life
- Parents and supporting
- Parents and active involvement
- Parents, reading and websites
Section C: Speaking from experience
- Parent voices
Comments
Interactive Parental Support
Plate spinning educator
With young children around the role of the parent extends from teacher, cook, bottle washer, counsellor, swimming instructor, dietician and taxi driver. When they finally go to school is it viewed with relief or dread? A few precious hours between 8am to 4 pm when parents, especially mothers, get a break, or the loss of the learning bond nurtured over the first five years?
During those early years you got a great buzz from the child’s development; those first words and steps; answering the stream of “why’s”; the solo control of their bike. They in return felt confident with you as their mentor, the reference point for all they didn’t know or understand. Those precious intimate days of teaching that involving a high degree of repetition and example progressed at the pace of your child as their knowledge base rapidly developed.
After holding sole responsibility for your child’s learning during the early years suddenly the programme is handed to a third party. In the past this involved a significant break in your role as a “teacher” but now parents are able to take a far more supportive role in the schooling of their children.
The repetitive practice function, so productive in those early years, is often sacrificed in school due to pressures of time and availability of resources, yet 75% of learning retention is achieved through practice! Similarly, being part of an average class size of 30 in school understandably dilutes the child’s mentoring link.
Working with the teacher to follow the national curriculum, parents can now access the same modern teaching resources used in school that allow them to practice the lesson content with their child at home. Importantly the emphasis is on fun as these resources are predominately educational games.
Being able to interact with your child’s school work in this highly productive manner overcomes the gap in your mentoring support, and is far more productive in helping their understanding than trying to help or manipulate their conventional homework.
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