Parents as Partners

Parental Involvement

‘Parent involvement helps extend teaching outside the classroom, creates a more positive experience for children and helps children perform better when they are in school’

https://blog.himama.com/why-parent-involvement-is-important-in-preschool

From our very first encounter with our parents, we enter into a positive partnership which we aim to maintain for the next seven years.  Parents are experts on their children and in our nurturing role as early years professionals it is essential that we ascertain this knowledge early on.

Home visits, ‘Stay and Play’ sessions and our ‘All about me’ booklets enable us to gain the valuable knowledge that the parents have about their child on entry to the setting.  This knowledge may be medical, developmental, about a child’s interests or family unit.

Our Tapestry Learning Journals, provide the facility to communicate with parents and share the children’s learning on a daily basis.  We encourage the parents to share home learning too.  By doing this we enable the parents to see the competencies of their child and therefore extend this learning at home.

Parental Engagement

In an increasingly busy World with many working parents we have to consider our engagement strategies very carefully.  We have adopted the following strategies to engage our parents:

• We are passionate about the children and their learning – this passion evokes trust and credibility
• We use Tapestry and Twitter to communicate swiftly with the parents – this may be outside of hours – our parents’ concerns are important to us
• We provide parents with comprehensive information about our curriculum, especially reading and phonics
• We provide bespoke training in reading, maths, phonics and the use of our Tapestry learning journal
• We meet with parents to set and review play plans for children with additional needs
• We meet with external agencies, SENco and parents
• We meet with parents formally twice a year at our PPRD – Parents meeting
• We provide an end of year written report
• We encourage parents to complete a reflection sheet following PPRD and the receipt of their child’s report
• We invite parents to Easter and Christmas performances, Child of Excellence celebrations, Church services, World Book Day events, Dad’s reading events, Sports day and Tiny tasters (2-4year old community play sessions)