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.
HI Christina,
ReplyDeleteI too agree that early literacy is vital to the foundation for further appreciation of books and informational texts. Although parents lead busy lives, there are ways that professionals can help them. For example, having a monthly theme such as literacy where the children can "check out" books from the classroom and return them in a week. Also, there could be special reader sign-up time where the parents could volunteer their time. This would allow the parents to come in to the classroom and learn from the teachers as well.
Not only do the parents lead busy lives, but the teachers do too. One of the benefits of being the teacher though is that we can give the children adequate exposure to early literacy opportunities both written and oral. Taking the children to the library or the museum and having conversations with them about what they are experiencing will increase their oral vocabulary.
I know that it can be frustrating as a teacher to see the lack of parent involvement. We try so hard to stress to our parents the importance of taking the time to read with their child, engage in some from of learning activity. I know that I try to stress to the families that my co-teacher and I work with on the importance of reading to their students. We share with them the favorite books that their child enjoys listening to and reading. We lend out books to our families. We encourage our parents to let their child assist in making the grocery list and assist in looking for those items in the store. There are so many ways that parents can have their children involved in literacy activities naturally, while still leading a busy life.
ReplyDeleteOne way to improve parental involvement is to improve parental trust and interaction. Sounds like this program doesn't have a lot of expectations for parents and as a result they get what they expect. If you have parents barely coming in to drop off kids why aren't people in the parking lot shagging down parents to let them know what's happening with their kid? I don't know developing a relationship with a parent only helps with getting parents involved, that's been my experience.
ReplyDelete