What to do after Parent/Teacher conferences
Parents seemed interested at conferences.... they asked "How can I help at home?" Now what should the teacher do?
10/23/20242 min read
Teachers have a lot on their plates.... and when parents are asking for ways to help their child at home.... It can feel very overwhelming. Often parents will ask you to just send papers home for the kids to use for practice. Unfortunately, most school printing budgets don't allow you to copy massive packets for home use. In fact, you might be lucky to freely make the copies you need for instruction in your classroom. So how do you help your parents help their children? Think back to the pandemic and how you had to teach and help children without physically being with them. I know I made a lot of videos (which at the time was a whole new adventure for me). Some of them were direct instruction for the kids and some of them were modeling for the parents of how they could help and support at home. I would model strategies and maybe give game ideas with things already around the house. I posted documents with links to online videos, games, and other instructional ideas. After we were able to return to in person learning... I continued to use those same strategies with my kids and my parents. It became a normal routine for me to create more independent, online activities for students to use in the classroom or at home when they were absent. These activities were also easily shared with families that needed resources to do extra practice at home. I continued to make short videos for parents that modeled what I was teaching in the classroom so that they could create activities at home around the same ideas. For those parents who genuinely want to help at home.... It’s more about understanding the content and teaching strategies than physical resources. Hopefully if they cared enough to ask... they will care enough to put some of their own time and energy into creating things to use at home. Work with a teammate to create online resources and lists of helpful videos and sites. Keep them in organized shared folders... and over time you will have a vast amount of easily sharable resources for those eager parents who want to support you and their child!