Learning English at home

As we know families have an important role in the education of their children. Teachers provide children with different tools to get knowledge in the school, but these are meaningless without the cooperation of parents in their homes. That's why parents should be involved in the education community. They have to create a home environment that encourages learning. 

Then, as teachers we must accept the need to invite, inform and train parents to be involved in their child's learning process. Furthermore, when families and teachers and communities work together, schools get better.  

How can we do that?

Theresa Zanatta provides us with five classroom routines to put this objective into practice:

• Routine 1: Keep parents regularly informed by sending home hands-on, student-made learning tools. Things like flash cards; take-home storybooks; and realia such as puppets, game boards, sentence machines, personal picture dictionaries, and spelling boards are memory and speaking prompts for describing and explaining what students are doing and learning in English class.

• Routine 2: Set up individual student portfolios or English folders for students to keep their learning tools organized and accessible. The English folder is much easier and quicker for parents to see how students are progressing in all of the four skills.

• Routine 3: Invite parents to comment on student-made classroom activities. Encourage parents to write the date, any comments or questions, and their initials on the back of the student-made learning tools that go home.

• Routine 4: Pupils teach their parents. The teacher is in a position to model and show students how to show parents how to foster and encourage parent interest and involvement.

• Routine 5: Send student-written letters home. Students can take home simple student-written notes to parents which the teacher dictates to them. This simple task invites parents to become involved in a regular way in what their child are learning and learning to read.

Finally, a quote from Albert Einstein:

“The Supreme art of parents and teachers consists in creating pleasure in the pursuit of creative expression and knowledge”.