For their joint Time 4 Learning Charter
School kindergarten program, Highland
View and College Park elementary
schools designed a calendar with parenting tips,
resources, and activities to ensure early school
success, as well as social and behavioral development.
This calendar helped parents of prekindergarten
students get involved with their
children’s education from the beginning.
Each subgroup within the Action Team
for Partnerships (ATP) researched and designed
a monthly topic in an engaging format.
The school then distributed one calendar to
each family. The $1,000 cost of creating and
distributing this calendar was supported by a
charter school implementation grant and fundraising
events.
The hanging calendar included a full
page of parenting information above each
month’s date grid. Some of the pages related
to activities that would take place that month.
For instance, September’s page had a guide to
preparing children for the first day of school.
Parents also received tips for asking good questions.
“What did you do in school today?” will
not yield the same answers that specific questions
would. It suggests that parents find out
actual activities from the day’s instruction and
frame questions around them. “Did you learn
about alligators and make a mask in school today?”
allows a child to extend learning from the
classroom to the home.
February’s page had a guide to expressions
of parental love, which included ways to
support interests and hobbies, express love and limits at the same time, and notice when your
children do something correctly, among the
many suggestions. Additional pages had tips for
discipline, a guide to preschool developmental
stages, and ideas for exploring reading, writing,
and math with young children. For example,
one suggested ways parents can point out mathrelated
concepts every day by, for example, using
number words in conversations, estimating
time, and measuring in cooking. The calendar
always provided contact information.
This timely resource proved helpful to
parents as they guided their children through
the first year of school. One parent said, “I
learned some things about what to expect from
my child at this age that I was not aware of
before.” Just by using a calendar, parents honed
their parenting skills and increased participation
in school, which is directly linked to improved
academic and developmental success