Essay: Ways To Involve Parents In Early Education And Importance Of Parent Communication.

1. a) Create a newsletter, handbook, brochure, poster or computerised display suitable for parents new to your service to explain how they can become involved in your service. Use headings in your submission and provide details of specific ways parents can do the following:

• Participate in their child’s experiences
• Share their knowledge, skills and/or expertise
• Share aspects of their family life and culture
• Help develop care strategies for their child
• Take part in making decisions
• Ask questions, raise concerns and make requests
• Provide feedback about the service

b) Explain why you believe parent participation and communication is important. Refer to the National Quality Standard (NQS) Elements or the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) Principles and Practices in your response.

c) Complete a table similar to the following explaining how you would make a parent feel welcome if they suggested they could become involved by sharing a skill. Provide at least one action you would implement at each point.

2. a) Prepare a presentation suitable to give to parents, and deliver it to your trainer/assessor, fellow learners or co-workers. The presentation should cover the following topics about the service:

• The philosophies and values of your service
• The service’s procedures that parents must follow; for example, on arrival
• The service’s procedures about addressing parental concerns or requests
• The service’s standards, policies and procedures in relation to incidents and how they are communicated to parents; for example, if an incident occurs, what you will do?
• How the service meets the needs of families who need assistance with the English language

b) Choose one topic from your presentation and provide this information in a manner that is suitable for people who have limited English skills.

c) Interview a parent and write down their responses to the following questions. Protect the parent’s confidentiality; you do not have to mention their name.

• Do you feel you collaborate sufficiently with service educators to develop care strategies for your child? In what ways?
• How do you find out about your child’s progress, relationships and experiences within the service? Are you satisfied with the level of communication? Why or why not?
• How welcoming do you think the service environment and educators are? What works well and what needs to improve?

d) Describe a decision you helped a parent make. Explain the situation and what you did to ensure the parents participated in the decision.

e) How can you improve your performance as an educator when working in partnership with families?

3. a) List indicators about a child and their family that may indicate they need additional support from resources within the community.

b) Create a notice or computerised display that responds to a current topic of concern or interest for a parent or parents at your service. If you have no relevant topic currently, ask your supervisor or trainer/assessor to suggest one.

The display should focus on two organisations outside of your service that are able to support the topic and the parents needing assistance. It should aim to meet:

• the National Quality Standard Element 6.2.2 ‘Current information is available to families about community services and resources to support parenting and family wellbeing’
• Element 6.3.1 ‘Links with relevant community and support agencies are established and maintained’.

Include in your display:

• a clear heading so everyone knows what the topic is
• current information about the topic
• what assistance each organisation can offer the parents
• a copy of any resources they provide
• a list of resources that can be accessed
• how the organisation and the resources can be accessed; for example, do they need a referral?
• who to contact
• any costs, fees or funding if relevant
• if information is available in a language other than English.

c) How would you ensure this information remains current?

1. a) The three factors interaction

b) I believe Parent participation and communication is important since it enable children to understand the connection to their family and community. National quality standard provide framework that requires parents to provide respectful, collaborative, relationships, supportive with families. This help foster the communication between educators, families and children thus communication unite these groups and share vision with view of achieving goals. Quality Area 6 for instance focuses on the uniting families with their children and the community in general to realize the vision hence achieves set goals for learning.

c)

2. Presentations

a) Prepare presentation

b) Building relationship through interaction of children, families and community in general.

Building relation is suitable and provide information to those who have limited English skills. This initiative make different people feel free to offer their ideas and participate as they also learn along with their children4.  With this relationship building ideas are welcomed in respectful manner that encourage participation. Building relationship also is based on respect for diversity that exist within the society with main focus on ability rather than weakness.

c) Interview a parent and write down their responses to the following questions. Protect the parent’s confidentiality; you do not have to mention their name.

I. Do you feel you collaborate sufficiently with service educators to develop care strategies for your child? Yes. In what ways? I normally take part in assessing my child’s performance in collaboration and with advice from the educator

II.  How do you find out about your child’s progress, relationships and experiences within the service? I normally check the results my child obtain from various test the child undertake in school. Are you satisfied with the level of communication? Yes to some extend am satisfied Why or why not? I am seeing some positive progress that reflect child’s performance

III. How welcoming do you think the service environment and educators are? I think the service environment is welcoming especially the respectful way the educators treat parents. What works well and what needs to improve? The only part that needs some improvement is the communication aspect mostly public relation aspect

d) Describe a decision you helped a parent make.

Ways to involve parents in Early Education

The decision was to retain parent’s child in our education center. The parent had idea of transferring child to another education center due to the feeling that child had little progress in English language. I ensured that the parent participated in assessing child English language skill especially written skills. The parent realized how positively the child has progress in English performance since the child joined education center hence the need to retain the child at the center. This situation has produce satisfactory results and parents fell happy with the overall result thereby appreciating our services at the institution.

e) We can improve performance as educator through allowing members of families to suggest some ideas that are also implemented in learning process or in educating their children. In this sense families will feel part of the system especially achievement of their children8. Educator feels motivated when families are involved in educating children. Involving families in educating children especially in decision making on the type of services provided to their children help improve the performance of educator.

3. a) indicators about a child and their family that may indicate they need additional support from resources within the community include

i. child health,
ii. The relationship between social and family functioning and child health
iii. Resource domain such as income, psychological and social capital

b) Notice on diversity

The most common issue in the current society is effect of diversity in learning especially where there is mixture of culture and ideas. As an institution educators uphold and respect the diversity that exists among children, families11 and community. With this respect the education center does not consider the following in offering services:

• Parent Income
• Psychology capital or
• Social capital

The institution respect diversity and harmonize service delivery to ensure children achieve desirable result based on their ability not social status.  With this in mind we encourage parents and family to participate through

• Decision making
• Suggestion for improvement and
• Assessment

Therefore, families and community should feel welcomed to participate in raising or child rearing exercise bearing in mind the following pillars:

• Building relationship
• Respectful partnership
• Reflective learning practice
• High expectations and
• Respect for diversity

c) We ensure the information remain current there is need to continuously update the information based on the current emerging issues in early child education. Moreover, information should also considers the set guidelines within the National Quality Standards (NQS).

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