The family makes critical contributions to a child’s achievement from early childhood through senior school. Talking and playing with infants, reading bedtime stories with toddlers, playing math and reading games with primary school students, helping junior school students with their homework, and establishing boundaries for teenagers are foundations for success in school. We, at TLT, want to ensure that these basics of a supportive home learning environment are met.
When parents, families and members of the community are involved in schools, all children benefit. Adult participation sends the message that school is important and the work children do is worthy of attention.
Research regarding the effects of family involvement on educational outcomes has clearly shown that parent involvement makes a positive difference in children’s academic achievement.
At The Learning Tree, we have developed a comprehensive approach to develop a partnership between the school, parents and the community. A comprehensive approach fosters positive attitudes about the school and about families and about community members because it respects the varying capacities of the school population as a whole.
Our planned approach for building this partnership rests on the following goals as adopted by Dr. Joyce Epstein’s Six Frameworks for Parental Involvement:
- Encouraging positive parenting skills
- Enhancing communication with families
- Increasing volunteerism and attendance at school events
- Enhancing learning at home
- Increasing the number of parents in leadership and decision making roles
- Enhancing and improving community collaborations
We have made it a priority to commit a great deal of time and resources to ensure that every student is given the opportunity to fulfil his/her full potential. This can only happen when we have engaged and committed parents who are willing to find the time to truly understand the huge role the home has in ensuring a child is nurtured and cultivated in a manner that will ensure his/her success in all aspects of his/her life.
We invite you to not merely look at the Six Frameworks but to look at how you, as parents, can also consistently utilize the parenting strategies to not only illicit the appropriate successful behaviors but also facilitate the creation of young minds who will be able to cope with the challenges of an ever changing, complex and challenging world. These simple yet effective strategies can be found in the senior school survival strategy document found on the sidebar of this section.
We understand that the junior school and senior school student is an incredibly complex, confused, stressed and anxious human being. But we also know that if we, as adults, teachers and parents can work together and in unison, these traumatic years can also be some of the most enriching, exciting and rewarding times your child will ever experience in his/her lifetime. Our task is to reduce the anxiety and angst and increase and raise to the surface, the confidence, engagement, innovation, respect and reflection that is within each and every one of our students.