Supporting Families Academically

Cajon Valley trustees & LCAP members have heard a lot about Family Fridays and other parent-focused events intended to help parents support their students academically.  While the District's focus has been on oral language and prioritizing family reading, many parents are asking how to strengthen their children's success even more.  The issue is nuanced because CVUSD has a 1:1 technology ratio, where all students have a device that they take home on a daily basis.  This practice makes it even harder for families to assist their children because even when children do have homework, it often is on a screen and largely unseen by the parents.  Without paper-based homework, parents sometimes don't know what their children are learning or how to help them master these foundational skills.  

I recently attended a first-grade family event at Flying Hills School of the Arts.  The event's focus was on 95%, a supplemental curriculum in the area of phonics.  The event was spearheaded by an assistant principal who introduced the concept of phonics, the state-required reading screener, and the scope and sequence of the 95% curriculum.  However, many of the terms used in phonics education are specialized, although not hard to grasp, and were unknown and unexplained in large part to the parents.  A first-grade teacher modeled a lesson to the parents, which most in attendance commented was helpful for them.  Next, we entered a classroom and watched a teacher instruct her students using the exact same lesson in an animated and fun way, as well as challenge the students to apply the new learning by writing five words on paper using the 95% strategies.  This helped solidify the lesson for the parents, but also revealed where some students were struggling to either follow the steps or master the skills.   It was a great opportunity for the students to see that their parents are invested in their education, and I'm sure provided opportunities for parents to later hold their students accountable for this new learning (and hopefully future learning as well).  

Another opportunity to equip families to support their students comes in the form of weekly classroom updates.  The District has been announcing its intentions to have teachers preview the week's learning, in part to keep parents informed, and in part to help increase attendance by building anticipation. This practice provides a great opportunity for teachers to prepare parents ahead of time with vocabulary, tools, and even strategies to help their child succeed in the new learning.  At the Family Friday event, some parents asked for a guide to the phonics instruction introduced in 95%, but the Scope and Sequence document used vocabulary unknown to parents and did not align the weekly skills focus with actual dates on the District calendar.  There seems to be a general discontentment with the capacity of our core curricula (both in math and language arts), so the majority of sites rely heavily on various supplemental sources, with each site left to make its own decisions about what and when to utilize.  Teachers already do so much.  Coming up with a newsletter from scratch on a weekly basis seems like an unnecessary burden, especially if it's going to include the essential academic support that families are requesting.  The ideal would be a District-provided, or at the least, site-provided (using the grade level team lead) template that previews the learning and keeps teachers on track and parents equally informed.  As we move ahead with the curriculum adoption process, I hope we once again consider a District-wide pacing guide that comes with parental academic previews and updates on grade-level specific learning.