School success starts at home
Filed under: Elementary school, Going to school, 4 years, 5 years, 6-7 years, Toddler, Preschooler, Literacy, Likes and dislikes
At the beginning of each new school year I'm always struck by how significantly parents impact their child's success--socially and academically every day. Children certainly bring their own unique stamp to the world, but parents play a significant role in the way this is manifest. The kids I teach are directly the result of the parents who raise them.
Children learn by watching and by doing, rather than by being told. They do, rather than analyze. They live through their emotions.. They are in the world, and of it, not removed from it. They are not capable of analytical reasoning the way adults are. They absorb. They watch, and follow suit.
When I am kind and gentle, and I celebrate the positives in my classroom, I notice the children trying harder to be kind and gentle with each other. They attempt to replicate the positive behaviors I point out. When I am punitive, and focus on the negative behaviors, I watch the class become a group of exasperated, nagging kids who tattle on each other and routinely enact negative attention-getting behaviors.
But it is a delicate, and sometimes difficult task to seek out the positives, and to reward them, when, during the first few weeks of school, the children test boundaries and resort on the negative behaviors they may have acquired at home.
Every year, I can see how the bases are loaded from the get go. I can see difference between the kids who sit down for dinner with their families and the kids who do not. The kids who play board games at home, and the kids who don't. The kids who regularly read with their parents and the kids who do not. The kids for whom TV is a regular babysitter, and the kids for whom TV is a monitored and limited pastime. And mostly, I can tell which kids have boundaries at home, and which do not.
So much is evident in the way they care for materials and classmates. The way they take turns and say thank you, or grab and push; the way they sit down with books--thumbing through them listlessly, or deeply engaging with the pictures even if they cannot read the text.
At the end of the day, everything comes back to this: the children who have adults at home who set boundaries, regularly engage in mealtimes, games and reading together, and who limit television to an hour or less per day, are the kids who are socially and academically competent right of the bat. They still may have individual learning and developmental differences or delays, but overall, they are well-rounded children who understand how to engage their peers, and recognize that learning is something deeply important and meaningful.
Yet every year there are always a handful (or more) of children who lack this support or modeling at home. They come to school empty handed. They have less skills, less empathy, and less understanding. They start the year making up for a deficit.
And every year I can't help wondering, how hard is it, truly, to sit down with your child and read before bed? Share a meal together? Play a game? Turn off the TV?
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