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11.5: Engaging Families

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    Engaging Families

    Teachers can make the following suggestions to families to facilitate their support of history and social science:

    • Encourage families to tell stories and sing songs to their child about their home culture.
    • Remind families that they are the child’s most influential models.
    • Support families to help their child develop strong, warm relationships with adults and children among their family and friends.
    • Suggest ways that family members can talk with their child about their daily work.
    • Suggest that adults find household projects to work on with their child.
    • Remind adults to notice and recognize when their child is cooperative and responsible.
    • Encourage adults to talk with their child about respect and fairness.
    • Work with adult family members as they establish some simple, age-appropriate rules to be followed at home and help children understand that there is a reason for each rule.
    • Share ways to establish some dependable family rituals and routines.
    • Remind families to discuss family plans and events with children before they occur.
    • Share with family adults the importance of recounting past shared events with their children. Suggest that they use storytelling to help children remember the sequence and details of everyday and special experiences.
    • Suggest families find a special place for items documenting children’s growth.
    • Encourage adult family members to tell children stories about their family’s history.
    • Suggest that they look for maps in places where their family goes.
    • Suggest taking different routes when going to familiar places.
    • Encourage families to talk about nature (i.e., weather, seasons, plants, animals, and so on) with their child.
    • Encourage families to talk about ways to help the earth (e.g., reducing waste, conserving natural resources, and composting).
    • Suggest that adult family members share elements of the natural world with their child that they especially enjoy.
    • Encourage families to talk with their child about the connection between cost and decisions to buy items and services.
    • Assure families that it is fine to have conversations about “wants” and “needs.”
    • Suggest that families show their children some alternative ways to acquire things the family needs or wants, and ways to help meet the needs of others.
    • Encourage families to begin sharing their values about money with preschool children.
    • As early care and education professionals, prepare to actively support families facing personal economic crises. Educate yourselves about available community services and, when possible, help families access them.[21]

    clipboard_ed55e791520dcb6c871604c5258c491f3.png

    Figure 12.12: This three-year-old boy is helping with the dishes.[22]

    This page titled 11.5: Engaging Families is shared under a mixed license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by .

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