Parent Outreach Night

Purpose

While my school hosts quarterly parent-teacher conferences, we had never had a parent outreach night where parents could learn en masse and in detail about specific topics that would help them be more engaged in their child’s academic development. This Parent Night event, which I proposed to my administration, and then organized with the help of my fellow K-1 teachers, was a chance “to share reading strategies”, literacy goals, and discuss math and social-emotional techniques (McGahey, 2005). Children who have parents that are actively involved in their education, meaning the “participation of parents in regular, two-way, and meaningful communication involving student academic learning and other school activities” tend to achieve higher than those who do not (Patrikakou, 2008, p. 1). By making this event easy to attend and accessible to all families, I have helped my students by teaching their family members how to provide additional educational support.

Having involved and informed parents directly benefits my students. Young student who have “parents [that] actively participated in early childhood programs not only display a head start in academic, social, and emotional learning,” they are also less likely to struggle behaviorally in the future. (Patrikakou, 2008, p.2). Helping my students’ caregivers support them more fully can lead to better future outcomes for my students on all levels. I also decided to create this event because my students' parents come from a wide variety of educational backgrounds, and some have had little formal education themselves. The purpose of this event was to make all parents feel confident when supporting their children, regardless of their own experiences in the education system. This event helped foster a supportive school community with open parent-teacher communication and provided resources for family members that will open doors for students' learning.

Preparation

I first brought up the idea of a family night to my kindergarten team at the beginning of our school year. The four of us all agreed that in previous years, parents have seemed confused about kindergarten academic and behavioral expectations, and that such a night would be beneficial. I then brought this idea to my school's literacy coach and our principal during a beginning of the year meeting, and they agreed with the concept and offered support for my planning process.

Before the event, all of the teachers at our K-1 campus met formally with two of our school administrators to discuss how we would like this event to look and function. Below are the notes that I took at this meeting, where my team and I decided how we would divide responsibilities amongst kindergarten teachers.

For the event, I chose to lead the reading strategies classroom, two of the other kindergarten teachers led a writing/phonics lesson, the final kindergarten teacher led a math strategies lesson, and the school counselor led a social-emotional lesson focusing on the requested calm down techniques. Below is a sample of my communication with our counselor explaining our goals for the parent night leading up to the event.

Event

Our event went remarkably well. Parents rotated by homeroom through four different centers to learn different educational and behavioral techniques. Each presentation by the teachers explained how we taught different subjects at school and included take home information for parents. Each teacher saved extra copies of all handouts and the day after the event, we sent home packets to all families for those who were unable to attend.

My reading presentation focused on explaining to parents what our expectations for the end of the year entailed, as this is something that parents have often expressed surprise over. I reviewed different examples of Fountas & Pinnell leveled readers from A to D. While reviewing, I explained some techniques for helping students read these books such as sounding out unknown words and sight word memorization, and let parents look through a few books on their own and ask additional questions.

Conclusion

While this resource is not directly for students, the benefits that it presents for them are significant. Helping parents feel empowered to support their child academically and reach out to their school community for the resources they need is an important step to building up student learners, especially with early childhood students who need extra adult support. Teachers can have a significant impact on their students, but we are far from the only adults in their lives. Having parents and family members who are able to open academic gateways for their child strengthens and supports all of the work that we do at school by continuing it at home. This is particularly true for students from lower income communities whose parents may have had less access to higher education themselves and may feel less comfortable helping their child with academic concerns.

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References

McGahey, M. (2005). Hosting a family literacy night at your school. Teacher Librarian, 32(5), 28-30. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/224873199?accountid=11752

Patrikakou, E. (2008).​The Power of Parent Involvement: Evidence, Ideas, and Tools for Student Success. ​Retrieved from http://www.centerii.org/techassist/solutionfinding/resources/ PowerParInvolve.pdf​