Advising Parents: Ideally, when parents come to the meeting they will find colourful posters (one of them a permanent chart showing times when teachers will be available to see them during the week), well-produced 'Home reading cards' and a booklet Advising parents 'How to hear your child read', or similar (see Figure 1). Some schools obtain children's books on a sale-or-return basis and run a bookstall at the meeting, so that parents can actually buy books to read with their children on the spot, and this is always popular.
You may also have produced your own video, starring children and teachers from the school, and demonstrating how, and how not, to hear children read. This is a great audience better discussion time as well as giving parents who don't like talking in public the chance to ask questions. If you have many parents who speak other languages, consider whether an interpreter or two would be useful.
Bert is all set for a telling thrust when I rush into the fray with a couple of different suggestions, such as Germany and Austria, or maybe Scandinavia and Finland. Both ideas sound wonderful to Bert, so his wife laughs at him and wins that round.
I'm not going to risk Advising parents any country at all in this book, or I should end up by slanting my advice toward them all. I really mean that. |
