Parent And Child Voice

[Guest LOSINGTHEWILLTOLIVE]

Can anyone give me some suggestions to support what the moderators call 'evidence of parent and child voice'? I am expecting this to relate to parents evenings, open days, volunteers in the classroom, speaking and listening and travelling ted but what else should we be doing?

 

Ideas please?

[catma]

How do you enable parents share what they see and understand what you are looking for in terms of "look listen and note" and how do you allow them to share their observations so that it's not just your opinion of how well their child is doing.

 

How you do this will depend on the type of parental involvement ethos your setting has, but i personally think it is about changing the type of information we give parents from "this is what I am teaching" to "this is what we are supporting your child in developing, this is how it might manifest itself and this is how you share your insights with us"

 

Cx

[Guest]

Also, do your parents have any input into their child's learning journals/scrapbooks or whatever you use? The schools in my area have a variety of ways for this - wow stickers from home, post it notes board from parents, scrapbook goes home at weekends, parents can write in scrapbook whenever they want. May favourite is that at the beginning of each term the parents get a sheet of wow stickers. They can not use any more than those on the sheet. This eliminates the super keen parents over using them.

 

If it is responding to child's voice as well as parent's surely that is following children's interests, involving them in planning etc...

 

Just a few thoughts anyway. Hope they are helpful.

[Guest LOSINGTHEWILLTOLIVE]

WOW these are great, but now I am worried we are not doing enough! Thanks so much for all your ideas

[Guest]

Try not to worry - our moderators have always been very human. Think about what you would like to do in this area in the future. Do something manageable before the visit - for example our school has given the parents a questionnaire - we were able to respond quite quickly. Also talk to the children about what they would like to do/learn about - have this clear in the planning - that is your evidence.

 

The scrapbook idea I spoke about earlier is something that you could if you want to go down that avenue introduce for next year - you can tell the moderators that.

 

The main thing is that the moderators are basically other practitioners - we were able to ask them what their thoughts about things were. They are there to help 'moderate' our judgments - they are not trying to catch you out - or they shouldn't be anyway. I hope no one has had any experiences to the contrary!