Parental involvement
Parents are their children’s first educators and at Raunds Park Infants we believe it is important to enable parents to be involved as fully as possible in their children’s education. Research shows that those children whose parents are supportive of learning both at home and at school make greater progress over time.
At Home:
The most effective way to support your children’s learning is to talk to them. Have every day conversations about things that have happened in your day and things that have happened in theirs. Relate your everyday chats to previous experiences and talk together about your plans for the future. This will help your child to express their own ideas and to develop their thinking skills and broaden their vocabulary.
Sharing books is another important way in which you can support learning. Reading scheme books teach children the basic reading skills and vocabulary that they need to know. However, reading is much more than reading scheme books and children need to share a wide variety of both fiction and non fiction books with willing and interested adults.
Teachers in year 1 and 2 will send home the targets that children are working towards in reading, writing and mathematics and at Parents evening you will have the opportunity to discuss how you can support your children at home in achieving these targets.
You will also receive details of the curriculum topics that are being covered each term and this is an opportunity for you to share your own knowledge with your children, or to find out more through books and research on the internet.
If you are interested in finding out more about how we teach reading and mathematics and how you can support learning at home please come along to our information evenings.
Finally, however you decide to support your children’s learning make it fun and only continue while they are alert and interested.
At School:
Do you have a particular interest or skill that you could share with the children. Do you think the children would be interested in hearing about your job. If so we would love to hear from you.
We are always pleased to welcome parents in to hear readers or to share books with children. If you are hearing children read we give you a short information session so that you feel confident in approaching the task.
Of course, some parents are unable to commit to regular sessions at school but there are still opportunities to support the school. We sometimes need help with one off tasks such as counting vouchers we are collecting, wrapping Christmas presents and stamping and sorting new books. If you think you might be able to help with some of these tasks please let Helen Marks know.
The Friends Association are very active and have planned various projects to support the school. Look out for their regular meetings as they are always pleased to welcome new members. If you cannot attend these meetings they would be pleased to know if you can help at the various events they organise.
We are always striving to improve the provision that we make for your children and your views and suggestions help us to plan for the future. At the moment we gather such information through parent questionnaires, report reply forms, informal discussions, parents evenings and informal feedback from governors.