Joni Samples

The Parent Connection: an Educator's Guide to Family Engagement Joni Samples

The Parent Connection is about helping you connect parents and teachers in the real world and work of raising successful children. For the purposes of this book, the reference to parents includes all other caregivers - extended family, foster parents, and other significant adults in the child's life. But how do we connect with each other? How do we make learning happen for children? How do we make learning fun, joyful, and meaningful? Throughout this book, we will explore how our parent-teacher connections lead to school success. From the beginning stages of our own attitudes about each other, we'll move to building skills around a series of situations that lead to more and more collaboration and culminate in a plan for increasing learning. Ultimately we will evaluate how our plan is going and tweak it as we go until we can say with surety and confi dence, "Learning for our kids is going great!"