Parent Teacher Conference

Start promoting conferences as early as you can! Make sure you send home information to families explaining when and where conferences are and laying out any next steps for scheduling conferences. 

Follow up with families, prioritize those you are most concerned about seeing, with a phone call, text, or email reminder.

Create a plan of action! Know exactly what you want to discuss and make sure you have supporting documentation such as observation reports, classroom work and more. 

Remember to lead with the positive and what their child is doing well in class. Offer families advice on helping with homework and how to reinforce learning at home. 

Arrange for interpreters if necessary. Click here to access Language Link! 

Parent Teacher Conferences should be a 2-way dialogue between families and teachers. It's crucial that both teachers and families talk during this time. 

Invite them to share their thoughts, concerns and ideas with you!

To help our students continue their learning at home and to support them in every way we possibly can, we want to provide some additional advice to our parents and guardians.

We acknowledge the very important role that parents and families can play in the education of their children. It is in this spirit that we offer the following recommendations based on the professional knowledge and on collective wisdom of teachers.

Spend time with your child. Especially for young children, nothing matters more than the amount of time spent with caring and nurturing adults. So, to the extent possible, do things together. Really listen to what they express. Make them feel important enough to deserve your time and attention. 

Recognize that learning is not limited to the classroom. What happens before and after school, and especially at home, has a strong impact on what happens in the classroom. Find ways to expose children to interesting, meaningful and real-to-life activities from which they could learn. 

Encourage reading. Just 30 minutes of reading each day contributes to improved performance in all academic subjects. So read with your child, if you can, or encourage independent reading that you could recommend or that your child selects.

Develop good routines. Set regular times for learning as well as a quiet and well-lit space for reading or for doing schoolwork - but not in bed or in front of the television. 

Put a premium on projects. Based on your child's interests and passions, encourage long term projects and application of knowledge. Examples might be starting a diary or a journal, learning photography or setting long term goals and developing a plan to achieve them. 

Urge your child to try hard. Success is often a result of effort, not just innate ability. Children are empowered when they believe that they can achieve their goals if they try hard enough. 

Create opportunities for success. High self-esteem is not only the cause of success but also the result of success. The job of teachers and parents, therefore, is to invent tasks at which children can succeed without lowering standards or diminishing rigor.

Set a good example. Remember that we cannot teach what we do not model. Children pay more attention to our actions than our words.