Teaching Parents Our Secrets

You’ve just spent the last 10 months engaging children in learning despite the tsunami of unexpected challenges year 2 of the pandemic hurled our way. You are tired, and you are ready for parents to take their turn keeping these young minds active and hooking their curiosity.?

The challenge is that we’ve spent years learning how to do that with dozens of children (all at the same time!), and parents, well, they’re still muddling through the learning process with the one or few they live with.?

The work we do as teachers is HARD, and summer is when parents get a little taste of the difficulty.?As teachers, we have a whole toolkit of ways to deal with the challenges that arise in a typical day with a child. Most parents do not. They can try and crowdsource the best way to deal with a tantrum, but at the end of the day, the process involves a lot of experimentation, trial, and error. And the errors erode relationships, increase frustration, and decrease motivation to learn with the one person they don’t get a break from when 3 PM rolls around.

That’s why behavior charts pop up on refrigerators this time of year and TV time increases exponentially – anything to keep the kids occupied and out of trouble. But that’s also why our students lose ground over the summer.?Enriched learning takes skill. And parents haven’t been taught how to do it.?

So what if this summer we share some of the secrets of the profession – the ways we:

• strengthen relationships with our students in order to lessen their need for acting out;?
• engage students in meaningful tasks that help them build independence, focus, and perseverance;?
• set expectations for open communication and mutual respect.?

What might that accomplish for our students over the summer? What might that accomplish for the parents themselves??

But, you may be thinking, I haven’t got time to teach parents! Good news, you don’t have to. Inspired Teaching has just created a compact but useful Resilient Summer?Handbook that incorporates the ideas discussed above and many others into a series of short articles and learning activities parents can use with children of any age.?Most schools give summer reading packets to children.?This is summer reading you can give to parents.?This workbook draws heavily from Hooray for Monday content, offering parents a window into the thinking and instructional approach Inspired Teachers employ with their children every day.?

Creating a common language with parents for how we strengthen relationships with children and what we expect them to know and be able to do paves the way for better partnerships with families when school resumes.?How wonderful would it be if our students came back to us in the fall having spent the summer engaging their Intellect, Inquiry, Imagination, and Integrity? This workbook can help!?

Wishing you a lovely week ahead.

Read the full issue, complete with additional resources, here.

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