I am Lisa Boa and I am an Early Intervention Pedagogue with an added focus on family learning.

We have been waiting so long to open our doors of the nursery and welcome our parents in and now we can 😊 I don’t know about you, but I had so many questions going around in my head at the start of term and I thought I might share these with you:

• • • What does opening our doors mean to educators, families, and children?
    • What should it look like, feel like and sound like?
    • How do we ensure all our families are included?
    • What strategies do we use to engage our families?
    • Do we know what our family’s needs are?

I am sure you will have more to add to my list. As part of my early intervention role, I am the champion for family learning and this can cover anything from daily informal conversations to Peep learning together programmes.

So why do we want to involve our families in the life of the nursery? There is lots of research about the benefits of involving and engaging families in their child’s learning. We know that working together with families can have long lasting effects on family relationships, family wellbeing and academic achievements.

‘It’s well proven that children do better when parents and schools work together. However, not all parents find it easy to be involved in their child’s learning. We want to help parents lay strong foundations for the loving, nurturing relationships that we know are integral to children’s emotional, physical, socio-economic and educational wellbeing’. (National Parenting Strategy 2012)

To help us do this we can think about what supports good parent involvement:

• • Relationships – We need to attune to our children and families, be responsive to their needs and emotionally available to them.
  • Communication – We want to provide clear, consistent, and continuous communication. We want to sensitively support any communication breakdowns and work together.
  • Flexibility/adaptability –We want to break down as many barriers as possible for families. That might mean thinking outside the box, offering different times and thinking creatively about solutions.
  • Strength based approach – Families are all unique, they come with their own strengths and resources and we want to empower out families through these. They know their child the best.

Sometimes we want to think about targeted approaches to our family learning experiences. Robust self-evaluation and a good contextual analysis will help support us to identify family’s needs and how we can support families to engage with us. Education Scotland has some great resources to support this.

Engaging parents and families – A toolkit for practitioners | Learning resources | National Improvement Hub (education.gov.scot)

Family Learning wakelet – Wakelet

 

One size does fit all, but it is maybe worth having some professional dialogue in your teams about how you support your families. Other resources you might find useful are:

• • Scottish government have a ‘supporting parents to further engage in their children’s development’ ELC module that you may find useful. Early learning and childcare practitioners: training modules – gov.scot (www.gov.scot)
  • The Early learning and Childcare Wakelet has lots of useful links e.g. Dug, parentzone, parents club, loose parts play, etc that you could share adapt and support families with. Early Learning and Childcare (ELC) Wakelet. – Wakelet
  • HGIOELC 2.5 & 2.7
  • A quality framework for children and young people in need of care and protection 2.2 & 6.3

Thank you for taking time to read this blog.

Please feel free to contact me @lisa.boa@falkirk.gov.uk if you have any queries I can help you with.