It’s tough to do everything else you’re supposed to be doing as teacher right now, as well as building home -school connections during remote learning. Here are some ideas that you can implement. They will help to nurture relationships and connections with students’ parents and family members/guardians when you don’t see them in person.
Building Home School Connections During Remote Learning
1. Have a Meet the Parents Session
If you have already had Open House Night, you can still try this. Plan in advance a half hour Meet or Zoom session and tell students they have to bring their parent(s)/guardians, and introduce them. Students love this (my friend who teachers remote third grade had a very successful time doing it) and you could have them tell a fun fact about their parents or a reason they love them.
2. Provide Important Information in the Home Language
Yes, we all know official school correspondence and special education documents need to be provided in home language, but if you are teaching fully remote, there is ton of info for parents that go home in emails or is posted on Google Classroom or websites. Consider providing these in home language too, to support parents and strengthen their trust in you.
3. Consider Having Parent-Teacher Conferences
Maybe your school is not doing parent conferences because of the pandemic, but you may want to have them anyway, even you do 10 minutes each. Parents will be very, very appreciative.
4. Assignments that Involve Family
You can create or use assignments for which students need to get family or household members involved. Check out this Family Interview, or students can choose a family member for the Interview an Immigrant Activity from my Immigration Resource on Teachers Pay Teachers.
5. Digital Newsletter
When we are teaching in person, many of us sent home paper newsletters weekly or monthly. If you are all remote now, consider doing a weekly newsletter such as this one from The Tuf Teacher! You can find several other digital newsletter templates that are free around the web.
6. Use the Remind App
This would be great to share helpful reminders with parents or to send home “positive notes” for a student or two each day. On Remind, you can select one or more parents , or the whole group, to text message!
7. Create a Class Cookbook
Invite students and their family to share recipes and create a class cookbook that all can enjoy with an app such as Book Creator.
8. Invite Parents for a Career or Special Talent/Hobby Day
Our school used to have a career day/week. You could still do something like this virtually! But, perhaps to be more inclusive, if all parents are not currently employed, you could have parents share a special talent or a hobby. Students will be really entertained! Parents will feel like they contributed to the students’ experience, even if they can’t do so in person.
If you also want some advice on strengthening your parent communication routines, you may enjoy this blog post.
I hope these tips for building home school connections during remote learning are useful and helpful! Please comment and let us know what is the most helpful tip!
