Published On: December 3, 2015

As a teacher I know parental engagement is crucial for student success, and teacher satisfaction. Parents of kindergarteners have a hard time realizing Kindergarten is not just games and play but a lot of hard work that needs to be continued at home. In addition, immigrant families have two more challenges to deal with – they are usually not familiar with the school’s expectations of them, and they may be overwhelmed adapting to the new culture, learning the new language, and making a living. This project will focus on having more effective communication with Hispanic immigrant families of kindergarteners and helping them engage their children in family literacy and math routines that will benefit the students’ learning as well as the parental satisfaction and efficacy.

Katzeva

 

Diana Katzeva teaches K2 SEI at the Samuel Adams. She has a master’s in ESL and a CAGS in Educational Leadership. Besides being a teacher, she also speaks English as another (not second!) language and is an immigrant mother too. Her passion is working with immigrant students and families and helping them succeed in this country. Diana is one of the recipients of the Sontag Prize – Recognition in Urban Education in 2010.

 


BLOG POST #1

As a way to engage parents of my Kindergarteners in a more systematic, structured way, I applied for an after-school grant proposal at the OELL office this school year. The idea is to engage 10 K1-K2 ELL students from the sheltered English classrooms in 60 hours of after-school activities, 30 meetings, two hours each. As part of the program requirements, families were invited to participate in at least three family events of one hour each. I spoke both English and Spanish at these events to make sure all parents, regardless of their fluency in English, were able to benefit from the presentation and practice of the literacy routines that I modeled. On the days of these family events, parents came an hour earlier than usual to pick up their children from the after school and participated in an hour-long event with the following agenda:

  1. Teacher presentation of a topic of academic interest — a simple literacy routine that could be easily implemented at home, in any language, and which did not require more than 10-15 minutes, fancy materials, or specialized training
  2. Parents filled out a pre-survey questionnaire to assess how comfortable they were in engaging their children in this particular literacy routine at home
  3. Teacher modeling of one or more activities related to this topic. For example, if the topic was the importance of High Frequency Words (HFW) fluency for fluent reading and writing, the after school students and I played some games such as HFW Bingo game, Hangman HFW game while the parents watched.
  4. Next, parents were given these games and invited to try them out with their children while I went around different tables, offering assistance and clarification as needed
  5. Parents filled out a post-survey questionnaire to see how confident they felt after the presentation and trying out part of the event in engaging their children in this games and practices at home in the future. I invited parents to ask questions they might still have about the games or why this skill in particular was important to their children’s academic success. Parents shared how the game(s) went and what they think about the experience
  6. Families were given these games to take home and use as ways to engage their children at home in the literacy practices that we just practiced as a whole group

What I learned from the first parent event:

  • Parents loved the opportunity to learn and practice two simple games that will help their children learn better their High Frequency Words AND have some family fun time at the same time!
  • Parents, especially immigrant parents, need help in feeling confident that they know what their children are learning at school, why, and how they can help at home
  • As a teacher, I need to look for other ways to help parents who might not speak English or even have extensive formal schooling feel confident and effective co-educators of their children. A parent does not need a PhD to help his kindergartener practice some literacy skills at home. He does need my support, a clear example of what it looks like, and a few free minutes
  • Working with parents is fun and rewarding for them and for me!
  • Children feel happy to see their parents and teacher working together to support their learning; this tells them that learning is fun and important.

Katzeva1

 

Katzeva2

BLOG POST #2: An “AH HA” Moment

Our second family meeting was on February 12, 2016. I invited all the families of the 11 students enrolled in the after school program, as well as the rest of the class – 21 families in all, one from SEI K1 and 20 from SEI K2. The welcome sign up sheet was signed up by 17 families, and I am pretty sure that at least one and possibly a couple families that came simply forgot to sign up. In terms of parental participation, this was a clear success. I planned the event for this day specifically (Friday, February 12) for a few reasons:

  1. It was the last day before our February vacation
  2. It was the day students at school celebrated Valentine’s day – the mood was celebratory, excited, and focused on community and friendship
  3. Perhaps those families who wished to celebrate (Valentine day) as a family, but did not want to spend a lot of money, this could be a perfect family celebration.

A week or so earlier, when I sent my Party Celebration and Data Sharing Invitation, I asked families to come, bring any kind of food they wished – if they could – and to have fun connecting with other families, meeting the friends of their children, and learning about our academic progress as well as important tests we will be having in the spring.

The event was segmented in the following way:

  1. Welcome and sign in (signing in also the BPS authorization of student work paper)
  2. Meeting and greeting other families, along with sharing our food. We had lots of home-made desserts, cookies, candy, juice and crepes and jellies.
  3. Almost an hour later, two parent volunteers took the students and their siblings to the next door class with paper and crayons to make a Valentine day art project (20-30 minutes) while I presented our DIBELS and Math Data to the families in both English and Spanish.
  4. Time for Q & A
  5. The children returned with their art projects and we all happily went home.

My insight: All families need time and space to connect with other families and meet the school friends of their children. Also, parents needed to connect to me – the teacher – at a personal level! During my many “small talks” with parents this evening, we talked about their lives and concerns. There was time for me to share with them important things (talking and reading to children, and that’s OK – even expected – in USA schools to advocate for your children) that said in the context of our social interaction felt a lot more personal and honest! We weren’t talking about our school or grade level learning goals. Within each small circle, we were talking about a child, a family.

Sure, this event was less structured and formal than what I would have expected, but at the same time, a lot more was accomplished. Plus, the cookies were pretty good!

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BLOG POST #3

Introduction

At our third meeting, we celebrated Mother’s day and our children’s year-long work! It was our opportunity to share and talk about final literacy and math tests and what to expect in grade one! Before the meeting, I went over each student’s progress-monitoring data in literacy and math and selected only a few items that were still not mastered, those that from my perspective as the teacher would be the easiest to tackle at home. I focused on these few items:

  • counting by 1’s and 10’s
  • mental number line 1-10
  • simple addition/subtraction using fingers in math
  • high frequency words
  • phonemic segmentation in DIBELS.

I gave a personalized “plan” to each family. Not all plans were the same, because progress and readiness is different for each child. I did not want to overwhelm parents or make them feel as if I am judging their children’s work as insufficient. I understand that each student and family have different realities and face different challenges and I would rather see the glass half-full!

At the request of the parents, we decided to have a final Kindergarten graduation ceremony and celebration in late June. We will have a picnic at a nearby park. Some current grade one parents of students I had last year asked me to invite them, too. I will use this as an opportunity to help Kindergarten and grade-one parents and children meet each other and network. This way the newly minted first-graders and their families will have the opportunity to hear from veteran first graders and their families about what to expect next year.

I am thinking about talking to the grade one SEI teacher and see if she would like to come to our Kindergarten graduation event too. That way, she will have the opportunity to unofficially meet her new students and families and they would be able to meet the teacher too.

Personal Insights

  1. Immigrant parents have different understanding about their roles in school
  2. Immigrant parents’ schooling might be uneven and/or deficient by our standards (according to them as well as by our standards)
  3. Immigrant parents might have learned subjects in different ways and not understand how we approach learning and teaching
  4. Personal factors (linguistic and cultural barriers, legal status, too many jobs or no job, transportation issues, young children at home, health reasons, etc.) might prevent immigrant parents from participating in school life
  5. Immigrant parents do want to ask questions and/or have concerns but they often do not know how to do about expressing them and may fear that expressing those questions or concerns might “hurt” their children instead of benefiting them
  6. Offering opportunities to celebrate and share food BEFORE sharing our own agendas can help parents open up because celebrations provide informal opportunities for them to meet us and feel comfortable talking to us
  7. Celebrations and food before agendas and teacher presentations help teachers test the waters and see what parents are like, what they might be or not be comfortable with, and how and to what extent their concerns and resources match what we expect them to do
  8. Celebrations also provide parents with the opportunity to meet both other parents and their children’s best friends. With other parents, they can share resources and information and form lasting alliances. Also, by meeting their children’s best friends at school they can get more accurate information about things or issues happening at school that parents don’t see at home

Questions to Consider:

  1. How do teachers and administrators want immigrant parents to be involved?
  2. How do we communicate this to immigrant families?
  3. How do we provide systematic opportunities in culturally sensitive ways for immigrant families to learn about school expectations in our school system?
  4. How do we provide information and education about students’ and families’ rights?
  5. To what extent do we use veteran, active immigrant parents and older siblings to engage and support the needs and concerns of newcomers?
  6. What are the community systems and resources that parents and teachers can use to work together?
  7. What can we do in order to reach hard-to-reach families? Could we, for instance, have a booth during weekends at places such as grocery stores, wash and dry establishments, parks and houses of worship that they could get quick information about things related to school? Any other ideas?
  8. Are there places were parents who have difficult issues or questions could go to get training that takes into account specific challenges, such as socio-economics, cultural differences and other issues that might be of concern to parents or that might be preventing them in approaching teachers and administrators?

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