For Families and Home Educators
For programs with a goal of enhancing strong school-to-family relationships and for those interested in attending family sessions or home visits, Babble Tree’s family engagement session resources are an option for communicating with families classroom learning goals and tips for sharing children’s language growth and development. Suggestions for how families and caregivers may expand upon research-based strategies in support of language growth and development are shared. Further, there are videos; guidelines, demonstrations and activities to link families to their child’s classroom community. In order for the resources to work well, a positive home-school relationship is needed. For example, the relationship should be built upon and exhibit mutual respect between families and school representatives. Though the Babble Tree tools have shown to be useful, they are only as effective as the strength of the connection between the educators and families of each program.
To address the goal to strengthen children’s oral language, school readiness and vocabulary development, videos, games and DVDs are available. A series of online presentations align with the unit themes or language topics of the program. More specifically, this includes parent education videos as a portion of the family engagement component. These are: 1) Ready for Take-Off, 2) A Strong Start, 3) Technology, and 4) Language and Literacy Rich Home Environment. Each presentation helps teachers or a home-school liaison understand more about “the what” and “the how to” of building oral language for a child’s first and second language.
The bilingual program overview and family guide validates the significance for supporting a child’s language development through simple everyday experiences. This resource presents a variety of activities for parents or family members to do together with children to support language acquisition. The booklet may be used to support a home visit, in addition to guiding family sessions to encourage language development. A goal is to link families to learning objectives in a non-threatening manner and empower families to identify ways they already work to support their child’s learning. The booklet is a useful instructional planning resource for teachers as well because it includes the curriculum scope and sequence, which illustrates the flow of language progression and skill development. This instrument is a key component of the program’s resource bundle.
Check out our Bilingual Family Guide
We are committed to sustaining the goal of supporting a two-way alliance between families and schools. Babble Tree recognizes the reciprocal nature by which schools and homes equally contribute to the welfare of a child’s growth and development.
Babble Tree believes in building positive home-to-school communication through information sharing in an ongoing and culturally responsive manner. The Bridges program features bilingual home communication messages to help teachers inform families of classroom learning including language goals and language progress while asking about their goals, successes and challenges at home. Bilingual home videos are put forth for entertainment and educational purposes. These resources serve to link families to the classroom-learning environment in very simple, practical and useful ways.