Chapter 3

Chapter 3 was called “Creating Classroom Community and Connecting with Families.” The chapter wasn’t the average description of building a classroom community and family involvement, instead this chapter described different activities that can be done using technology. This was an interesting approach, as I have never heard of the many different ideas in this chapter. This chapter had two great examples which both creates the classroom community and gives the families a chance to be involved. 

For me, the part that I want to speak to is how the family is involved in these projects. Creating projects online allows parents and families to go in and view a child’s work. This makes the family feel welcome and engaged in their child’s education. However, the part about this that I find to be one of the best aspects is that family can go in and view these projects and it’s different than just receiving complete papers in their child’s folder. As I have most likely mentioned, I am a nanny for a single mother of three children. Two of the children are twins and just started kindergarten. The papers the children come home with are ridiculous. There are at least 5-10 pages of completed work in each child’s folder every day. This is super overwhelming for the mother to receive every day and at the end of a long school day and completing homework, the boys don’t really care to explain what they did on all of these papers with their mom. The kids have been in school for about 3 and a half weeks now and the stack of papers is getting very high. Of course as a parent you can’t help but feel guilty recycling all of your kindergartner's precious school work, but the stack of papers gets crazy and just creates a mess.  These papers are so overwhelming that they end up being meaningless and just get thrown into the messy stack. But, creating projects online allows the parents to go in and view it, where they can hear the teacher’s introduction on the project and hear their child talk about it. How awesome is this! No cluttered papers, and an interactive, more meaningful experience to view your child’s work. The parents can go in and comment on their children’s work, where the child can then be excited to go to school and see their personalized message from their families. Parents can also include children in viewing their work, where they can talk about it together, and the families have more of an idea of the meaning behind the projects and know what to ask the child about it. 

This is much more meaningful than just receiving papers and projects in a child’s backpack at the end of each day. I have never thought to use technology in such a way as this chapter described, to promote classroom community and family involvement. I am glad that I was introduced to this, as I can now use this in my future classroom and prevent families from messy, cluttered piles of school work!