Are You Involved in The Classroom?

Children spend approximately seven hours a day at school and in the classroom. During those seven hours, children are learning and exploring new topics. What a child learns during the school day should not stay bound within the four walls of the classroom, but parents should be given the resources and opportunity to help expand on what their child has learned at school, in the home.

A group four of children playing a game

The amount of parent involvement can determine how successful your child can be in the classroom. If learning stops in the classroom and is not fostered at home as well, children are not able to practice important skills in real-life contexts outside of the schools. Parents know their kids best and can work to expand on skills in a way they see works for their child's learning needs. Not only does parent involvement help the student learn and grow, but it also allows the parents to be more in touch with the teachers and have an open line of communication which has numerous benefits. Parents and teachers should be working as a team through communication to teach their children continuously both in school and at home. 

While a lot of us know how important parent involvement is, there still seems to be a lack of it in the majority of classrooms these days. To me, it seems crazy that parent involvement has been declining over the years when the resources we have gained to allow communication have increased. For example, aside from paper and pencil updates and required brief parent-teacher conferences, there is new technology and apps to encourage easy communication. There are numerous educational communication apps designed for parents and teachers to communicate easily and allows for sending videos, observations, quick texts, all with the ability to send messages to the whole class, or individual families. Everyone has a powerful tool for communicating to allow for more parent involvement, their phones, but it is up to the parents and teachers to decide whether or not they take the simple steps to use them.