Week 6 – Home-school connection / Muffin Mondays

It is well known, and totally proven, that when parents and teachers work together, the children benefit.

Teachers should be aware that they should know some details about children's home life to complete their understanding of each of the pupils they have in class, but this is just possible with the help of the parents, who should keep the teacher informed about the recent changes in the child's family life (divorce, a death in the family, or illness, for example), important traditions or rituals, languages spoken at home, and other significant details unique to them.

Days to share the culture of the children in your class will help to strengthen the pupils’ self-esteem and also create a great sense of community and a respectful environment in the class where they can value the diversity as a way to learn instead of fearing it because they do not know anything about it.

Obviously, to share all this information, the parents must feel that they are part of the school community, so the idea of Muffin Mondays is a really good way to encourage this type of conversation.

Muffin Monday or Muffin for Mums (can be renamed as Muffins for Parents or something along these lines) is a weekly meeting with the parents on Mondays to talk about how is everything going and what are they doing in class.

As we all know parents have difficult timetables to accommodate around school schedules, so it would be effective to send little letters home, where the pupils write about what they do and try to collect them the next day. Here’s a link to an example of how it can it be done:  
http://www.slideshare.net/Juditalaez/environmental-print-letter

This blog contains a lot of useful information for teachers, and in this entry you can find some prints related to home-school connection as a blinding contract or what details could be used to improve it.
http://secondgradesavvy.blogspot.com.es/2012/07/student-binders-intro-and-homeschool.html