Engaging Parents In School…

I’ve found several good resources sharing ideas on how parents can best help their children learn, and decided to bring them together in one post. You can see all my parent engagement-related “The Best” lists here.

Here are my picks for The Best Ideas On How Parents Can Help Their Kids With Schoolwork At Home:

Lorna Constantini has posted a link to a Livebinder of parent resources with activities that parents can do at home.

“But What If I Don’t Know English?” is another great resource from Colorin Colorado. It shares ideas on how parents who don’t speak English can still help their children develop literacy skills.

Census: Parents Reading More With Their Children is a new Education Week article that includes useful research that teachers might want to share with parents. It could be used to help parents see what are some good ways they could interact with their children to encourage learning.

En Camino: Educational Toolkit For Families is a series of free online “modules,” available in both English and Spanish, designed to help answer parent and student questions about college. It’s from the National Center For Family Literacy.

It’s related to three other “The Best…” lists:

The Best Posts About Getting Our Students To Attend College

The Best Sites For Encouraging ELL’s To Attend College

The Best Resources For Showing Students Why They Should Continue Their Academic Career.

Involving Latino Parents in Homework is a nice practical post from ASCD Express.

Ed Week’s Learning The Language blog recently posted information and links to a number of resources in English, Spanish, Hmong and Somali for parents with children who might have learning disabilities.

New York Times’ columnist Tom Friedman has published a pretty interesting column on the importance of parent involvement, though I do wish he had a better headline than “How About Better Parents?” In it, he highlights a a couple of new studies (and includes links to them) and quotes one researcher:

Schleicher explained to me that “just asking your child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring. It is something every parent can do, no matter what their education level or social background.”

4 Reasons Parents Should Speak Heritage Languages at Home is a very important article for teachers who have immigrant students.

People For Education publishes multilingual materials useful for parents. Though some of them are unique to Ontario, others can be used elsewhere. Here’s a sample in English.

Also, you might be interested in this related research on the role of parents in helping students develop their aspirations: “the most effective way of helping children from low-income households to achieve their ambitions is engaging parents in their children’s learning.”

College Bound is a series of videos — both in English and Spanish — designed to help parents get ideas on how they can support their children academically. Parent have to register at the site in order to watch them, but it only takes a few seconds to do so. The videos are very accessible, and a few of them seem useful enough for teachers to use them in the classroom with students.

I liked two in particular — one was on the physical effect that learning has on the brain, and the other was on failure (you might be interested in The Best Resources For Showing Students That They Make Their Brain Stronger By Learning and in The Best Posts, Articles & Videos About Learning From Mistakes & Failures). You can read more about the site at How Can Schools Best Communicate with Immigrant Parents?

Teachers tell parents how to help their kids be better students is from The Washington Post and, even though I’d prefer if the headline wasn’t “teachers tell parents,” it still has some good information.

Nice NY Times Article On Parent Involvement — On Their Fashion Page! is a post I wrote summarizing a good Times article.

Feedback is welcome.

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You might also want to explore the 780 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

Filed under: Best of lists