High Quality PreKindergarten Family Engagement Plan
High Quality PreKindergarten Family Engagement Plan for LIPAN ISD
Definitions of Family and Family Engagement:
Family includes adults and children significant in the child’s life who support the early learning and development of the child.
Family engagement is the mutual responsibility of families, schools and communities. Family engagement builds relationships to support student learning and achievement and to support family well-being, family-student relationships and ongoing learning and development of children, families, and educators. Family engagement is fully integrated in the child’s educational experience and supports the whole child. It is culturally and linguistically responsive and continues through a child’s life.
Components and Strategies of a Family Engagement Plan:
1. Create a foundation for collaboration of mutual partners:
- We foster a collaborative exchange of information with our weekly newsletters.
- We encourage family participation in decision-making with our Site-Based Committee and PTO organization.
- We utilize Class DoJo to communicate with parents about situations and events pertaining to the school.
- We use phone/email communication with the parents directly about the student’s progress throughout the year.
2. Embrace the individuality and uniqueness of families:
- We have a Fall Festival, Christmas Program, and end-of-the-year program for parents to come up and observe the students actively participating in school functions.
- We use a variety of means to welcome and communicate (Meet The Teacher, Open House, and Class Parties).
- We have multiple opportunities to attend workshops for professional development.
- We have designed experiences for families that provide a variety of activities and observations with our parent-teacher conferences, field trips, & class parties (Valentine, Thanksgiving, Easter, & Christmas).
3. Promote a culture of learning that is child-centered and family driven:
- We use positive parent practices such as positive parental contacts.
- We provide a welcoming environment that reflects on parent experiences, practices, new strategies and class parties.
- We use positive contacts, notes, and emails to talk with our families about their children’s signals to help the family’s interpretation and responses.
- We work together to help children overcome behavioral challenges by having conferences, phone calls, and emails.
4. Establish and articulate expectations:
- We send home all informal and formal data collections to help us focus on using that data to promote continuous family engagement.
- We work together with families to imagine new learning opportunities for their community.
- We help parents and families understand the types of involvement that will help achieve the goals and objectives identified to meet the needs of the child and family.
5. Evaluate and improve family engagement efforts:
- We ensure that our family engagement activities and district/school teaching and learning goals are aligned by sending home family projects and activities that correlate with what we are learning about at school and by using those teachable moments when big, important events happen in our students’ lives.
- We instill the belief in educators/staff that family engagement is a core strategy to improve teaching and learning.