Chapter 10

School, Community, and Family Partnerships

"When teachers are asked to identify their greatest problems in working with struggling readers, they often mention the lack of parental involvement in providing additional support" (Bean, 2015, p. 241). This is a problem I often encounter in my own classroom. Parental involvement is extremely important! Teachers play an important role in involving families in their child's academic success. Bean (2015) suggests a number of ways in which reading specialists can work with parents and families as:

* School personnel must have an understanding of and appreciation for the families whose children they serve. Often times, teacher do not live in the community they work in.  As an educator, it is important for us to get to know our students and their background (Bean, 2015).

* Work with families to help them understand the school's academic and behavioral goals and expectations. Teachers often depend on making phone calls to communicate with their students' parents. Social media has become a form of communication between teachers and parents. For example, teachers may create Twitter accounts where they communicate with their students and parents (Bean, 2015).

* Create an environment that welcomes parents into the schools. Encourage parents to take part in their child's school community. Invite parents into the classroom for career day and allow them to speak to student's. Have parents read a book and share the book with students and create projects with them based on the reading (Bean, 2015).

* Parent involvement should extend through the grades. This should not only take place in the primary grades. Parent involvement should continue throughout all grades (Bean, 2015).

If teachers and parents work together to help their children, student success will occur!

Share the Wealth

I find Reading A-Z as great resource for teachers! Reading A-Z is used in a number of different schools across the United States and Canada. It provides teachers with easy-to-use resources such as: 

        *books correlated with the CCSS.

        *lessons, decodable books, reader's theatre, activities related to each individual leveled reader                (29 different levels), and assessments.

        *fluency passages used to improve children's reading rate.

Reading A-Z provides teachers with over 1,000 leveled readers in different genres which meets the needs of every student. The leveled readers are both projectable and printable. I find this to be useful in the classroom as I am able to project different texts that I allow my students to use in reading centers. Another great feature to the level readers is texts can be provided to students in Spanish. This is great for teachers who have any ELL learners. 

Reading A-Z gives you a break down of each of the individual reading levels. It is useful for teachers to know which level their students are on based on their grade level. I also use Reading A-Z as a supplemental for guided reading. For my low students, some of the guided reading books provided by the reading curriculum we currently use, I feel are sometimes still too hard for my low group. Reading A-Z comes in play when I need to provide my students with a lower level reader. With each leveled readers, I am provided with lesson plans, vocabulary words, and activities that correspond with each reader.