Provides advice for elementary teachers on collaborating with parents to enhance a child's educational experience.

Empowering Family-Teacher Partnerships: Building Connections Within Diverse Communities prepares students to work collaboratively with families and community professionals in support of children's early education and development. Students are invited to develop a personal philosophy of family involvement to guide their work with families and to join a community of learners in relying upon their collective insights and problem-solving skills to address family involvement challenges. The author takes a student-centered approach to delivering substantive information and framing activities, providing: (a) comprehensive coverage of the diversity of family lives represented in classrooms and strategies for working with those families; (b) challenges to family involvement and strategies for addressing them; (c) strategies for communicating effectively with and empowering families, and (d) reflections, activities, tip boxes, and field assignments designed to facilitate students' skills in building positive family-school-community partnerships.

With the National PTA's Standard for School-Family-Community Partnership as a framework, this guide offers advice for resolving common points of contention between parents and teachers, such as the most productive use of a parent-teacher conference, the best at-home environment for doing homework, the helpfulness of parental rewards for classroom performance, and a teacher's role in supporting a student with an at-home crisis. This solution manual draws from real-world experiences of parents, teachers, and administrators to tackle issues of communication, parenting skills, classroom volunteering, and mutual respect.

Confident Parents, Confident Kids lays out an approach for helping parents—and the kids they love—hone their emotional intelligence so that they can make wise choices, connect and communicate well with others (even when patience is thin), and become socially conscious and confident human beings. How do we raise a happy, confident kid? And how can we be confident that our parenting is preparing our child for success? Our confidence develops from understanding and having a mastery over our emotions (aka emotional intelligence)—and helping our children do the same. Like learning to play a musical instrument, we can fine-tune our ability to skillfully react to those crazy, wonderful, big feelings that naturally arise from our child’s constant growth and changes, moving from chaos to harmony. We want our children to trust that they can conquer any challenge with hard work and persistence; that they can love boundlessly; that they will find their unique sense of purpose; and they will act wisely in a complex world. This book shows you how. With author and educator Jennifer Miller as your supportive guide, you'll learn: the lies we’ve been told about emotions, how they shape our choices, and how we can reshape our parenting decisions in better alignment with our deepest values. how to identify the temperaments your child was born with so you can support those tendencies rather than fight them. how to align your biggest hopes and dreams for your kids with specific skills that can be practiced, along with new research to support those powerful connections. about each age and stage your child goes through and the range of learning opportunities available. how to identify and manage those big emotions (that only the parenting process can bring out in us!) and how to model emotional intelligence for your children. how to deal with the emotions and influences of your choir—the many outside individuals and communities who directly impact your child’s life, including school, the digital world, extended family, neighbors, and friends. Raising confident, centered, happy kids—while feeling the same way about yourself—is possible with Confident Parents, Confident Kids.

How to build productive relationships in math education I wasn’t taught this way. I can’t help my child! These are common refrains from today’s parents and guardians, who are often overwhelmed, confused, worried, and frustrated about how to best support their children with what they see as the "new math." The problem has been compounded by the shift to more distance learning in response to a global pandemic. Partnering With Parents in Elementary School Math provides educators with long overdue guidance on how to productively partner and communicate with families about their children’s mathematics learning. It includes reproducible surveys, letters, and planning documents that can be used to improve the home-school relationship, which in turn helps students, parents, teachers, and education leaders alike. Readers will find guidance on how to: · Understand and empathize with what fuels parents’ anxieties and concerns · Align as a school and set parents’ expectations about what math instruction their children will experience and how it will help them · Communicate clearly and productively with parents about their students’ progress, strengths, and needs in math · Run informative and fun family events · support homework · Coach parents to portray a productive disposition about math in front of their children Educators, families, and students are best served when proactive, productive, and healthy relationships have been developed with each other and with the realities of today′s math education. This guide shows how these relationships can be built.

′Chris Athey has made a major contribution to our understanding of how young children think and how educators and parents can best support their learning. This book is, without doubt, a most important text for all who are concerned to maximise the potential of early childhood education to develop effective ways of working with young children. The book explores children′s schematic development and offers ways of teaching which are closely matched to children′s actions, speech and graphic representations. This second edition of Extending Thought builds on the scholarly approach of the first and provides readers with clear explanation of relevant research alongside rich observations of children. It is essential reading for all who seek to provide the very best of learning opportunities for young children by bring parents, professionals and informed pedagogy together in a thoughtful and informed partnership of learning. Extending Thought is a major building block for many of us who study young children′s capacity to think and learn′ - Dr Cathy Nutbrown, Reader in Education, University of Sheffield In this fully revised version of Chris Athey′s classic text, the author builds on her original internationally renowned research with new illustrations of ′continuity′ in children′s thinking from early to primary education. Drawing on her extensive experience and research evidence, she explains how teachers of young children can advance professionally towards a greater knowledge of young children′s thinking and learning. The book covers: o ′forms of thought′ used by young children o assimilation of curriculum content o pedagogy o parental participation o the politics of early education This book is an essential read for students and teachers in early years education. Chris Athey M Ed, was Principal Lecturer in Education at the Roehampton Institute of Higher Education (RIHE). Funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, she directed the Froebel Early Education Project from 1973 to 1978. She has taught all ages of primary-school children in State and private schools. She has considerable experience of initial teacher training and INSET

Strengthen programs of family and community engagement to promote equity and increase student success! When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students′ education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, the fourth edition of the bestseller School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, presents tools and guidelines to help develop more effective and more equitable programs of family and community engagement. Written by a team of well-known experts, it provides a theory and framework of six types of involvement for action; up-to-date research on school, family, and community collaboration; and new materials for professional development and on-going technical assistance. Readers also will find: Examples of best practices on the six types of involvement from preschools, and elementary, middle, and high schools Checklists, templates, and evaluations to plan goal-linked partnership programs and assess progress CD-ROM with slides and notes for two presentations: A new awareness session to orient colleagues on the major components of a research-based partnership program, and a full One-Day Team Training Workshop to prepare school teams to develop their partnership programs. As a foundational text, this handbook demonstrates a proven approach to implement and sustain inclusive, goal-linked programs of partnership. It shows how a good partnership program is an essential component of good school organization and school improvement for student success. This book will help every district and all schools strengthen and continually improve their programs of family and community engagement.