Observing and Interacting With Families of the Children in Your Setting

Blog #4 Christina Graves
2/25/13

I observed and interacted with my parents in my own classroom as I start to prepare for an month long reading project in March. To celebrate the birthday of Dr. Seuss and Read Across America, the national effort to get people to read to children, I am planning a reading event of my own. I am having a Mystery reader come into the class to read each day of March, hopefully. This all is up to how many parents I get to volunteer. It should be pretty interesting. So, in preparation for this, I have been interacting with parents, director of our center, director of the Y and other community helpers. I am trying to get a fireman to come. Well, I introduced it by putting the information on the parent board which is right inside the classroom door on Thursday. Today, Monday, I have one parent signed up and a few more saying they will. One said she saw it but didn’t read it so she read it today and hopefully thinking about it.

One learning experience that I have had is that it is not easy to get parents to volunteer for something even so simple as one book. I was wondering if I should use a little bribery and get like may be a coupon from DQ or Macdonald’s or something if they come and read. This leads to one insight that I have gained from interacting with the families. I have had a few that were totally excited. One mom is getting both grandparents involved but most seem to be ignoring the event all together. I hope it will just take some time for them to plan and schedule the time. One the other hand, the managers and directors at The Ymca are all getting involved in this. I have 3 already and hoping for more.

Observing and Interacting With Program Director(s) and Other Administrative Staff in Your Settings

February 12, 2013

Christina Graves

The program director at the YMCA Kidcare Station is Ms. Linda and she definitely has a busy job. In the last two weeks that I have observed her, she reorganized the menus for all the meals, billed, collected and entered payments for tuition, webinar trainings, and whatever spontaneous problems or situations came about.

One insight that I saw during this time that is related to reading to children is the parental involvement (or lack of) and lack of commitment to their child’s education. Ms. Linda told me that she has seen parents barely walk in the door of the classroom to sign them in, let alone walk them to the bathroom to make sure they wash their hands like they should. She can’t imagine that these same parents would read to their children on a daily basis. Ms. Linda also is in charge of the Scholastic book orders that parents can get. This month, the order only had one parent get any books. . I know that the Ymca is all about advocating to get the children healthy and active. They are working on the Strong Kids campaign right now and Ms. Linda has to get so much money from people. It is quite a chore but people seem to believe that this is important for children. If only we can get the importance of reading to children and how it will help them grow mentally and socially as well as physically,  being a teacher would be a lot easier for the fact that parents would be on board to help.