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January 13, 2006
Live Oak is Getting Ready
This week I’ve had the privilege of working with the Live Oak Unified School District in Live Oak, CA http://www.greatschools.net/modperl/browse_district/909/ca. What a great group!
Their request was to include parents in school and learning activities, something I love to do. On Wednesday evening I met with teachers from Luther Elementary, Encinal Elementary, and Live Oak Middle School. We spent the evening, besides having a great dinner, talking about what differences it could make at their schools if parents were involved in learning, especially what was being learned at school.
Certainly meeting state and Federal requirements was part of the discussion, but a bigger part was what difference parent involvement could make in a child’s success in school-better grades and test scores, better behavior, and better school programs.
Probably the most fun for everyone was actually doing some activities. We used the Parent Playbook http://www.edsuccess.com/index.html series I’ve compiled as a base. I demonstrated a couple activities, but three of the teachers took the show.
Tony showed everyone, even the kindergarten teachers, they could do eighth grade math by using numbers from license plates. He had us doing algebra equations without even thinking about it.
Carleen had soaked lima beans for everyone. Acting as fifth grade science learners, we took off the seed coat, opened the beans, and got to look inside for all the parts that would be growing into full plants. Well, not from these beans after what we did to them, but normal beans.
Gail helped us be kindergarten/first graders learning sentences. She showed us a sentence written on a strip of paper and told us how to cut the words apart, mix up the slips of paper, and let the beginning reader put the words back in the right order to read the sentence. She reminded us to cut the period (.) apart too, so the sentence would have its proper ending.
The evening was fun, and I left knowing the Live Oak staff had some new ideas percolating for their parents.
Posted by Dr Joni at January 13, 2006 07:22 AM