EDUCATION MATTERS—SANFORD SCHOOL'S PRIVATE SCHOOL BLOG

The parent-teacher relationship is Key in your child's success

A positive parent-teacher relationship is vital to a child’s success in school. Parent-teacher conferences provide an opportunity to strengthen the home and school communication. You and your child’s teachers are a team, and a conference is similar to a team huddle where a game plan for success is being reviewed and, if necessary, revised. Both the parents and the teacher are highly invested and interested adults who will use the meeting time to exchange information that will ensure that your child’s academic and social-emotional well-being are moving forward. This spirit of collaboration and cooperation between home and school will go far in enhancing your child’s opportunities for success. There are a few strategies that parents can do to ensure that your private time with your child’s teacher is used to its maximum benefit. 

Many schools take the time to highlight the amount of diversity on their campus, and with good cause: time and again research shows that all students benefit when the student body is diverse. Below are four reasons that it’s worth your while to take notice when schools affirm that diversity matters.

 Who likes to do homework? We all have work that we need to take home in different forms, but it helps us to prepare for our next day, week, or month. Most students have nightly work, preparations for projects or tests, which is designed to prepare children with the necessary skills to succeed at various levels of educational development. Daily homework should reinforce skills learned in the classroom and preparing for tests/projects should require time to plan and work.

Each student is a unique individual, and how and when he or she works needs to be specific to them. What may work for your first child may not work best for your second child. Plan, plan, plan and be sure to have a good home-and-school partnership to ensure success for each of your children.

Here are a few quick tips on how parents can help with homework:

• Provide a quiet, distraction free work area such as a desk or table with good lighting and no distractions.

• Routine time to work—it’s a good idea to schedule a similar time each day to do work so each child gets into a routine.

• Help your child create a homework plan each night—if you know that one night is busier than others, help your student plan out how to get the work completed and/or work ahead for the next busy night. A visual calendar helps with this organization skill.

• Parent-teacher partnership—know the expectations of your child's teachers so you can help reinforce those expectations at home.

• Have the student do his or her own work—let’s face it, you’ve already completed the grade your child is currently enrolled in, so it is his or her turn to learn and do the work on their own.

• Role model—if your child is working, you can be working too. You can be prepping for dinner, balancing your checkbook or completing any other adult work you may have.  This sets a great example of good work ethic for your child.

Back-to-School Checklist

New shoes, sharp pencils, and fresh starts: the beginning of the school year offers students the opportunity to improve study habits, forge new relationships, and acquire new skills. It is a time of immense potential for discovery. As such, it is very important to hit the ground running. Not only does conscientious preparation enable a student to capitalize on this fresh start and avoid playing catch up for the rest of the year, but it also minimizes the back-to-school dread and angst some students experience.

Here is a checklist that can help to make this preparation easy and painless.

• Buy Books
  Purchasing the upcoming year’s textbooks is obviously crucial to a student’s success in school. It is every child’s nightmare to show up to school already nervous only to realize that they don’t even have the right materials to succeed. This is a very simple task to accomplish early as there tend to be emails to parents or links on a school’s website regarding the purchasing of textbooks.

• Do Summer Reading
  One sure way to win a teacher’s approval and ease the transition from summer to school is to make sure all of a student’s summer work is completed. Just check your summer work syllabus to make sure you have all of the work complete for the appropriate class before school starts and it will undoubtedly take a load off of your mind.

High School is one of the most important influences on the lives of adolescents. It becomes a student’s world at an age when they are still developing their identities, growing into adults, and learning about life. The teachers, students, and learning material serve to influence how teenagers think and view society as they adopt more responsible roles in their own lives. Something that has such a large impact on students' lives should be chosen with careful consideration. A student’s school should be welcoming and tailored to their needs with many exciting opportunities to take risks, make connections and be creative. There are many factors in this monumental decision to consider in order to get the most out of the experience, including:

Classroom sizes
Whether big or small, this choice should be influenced by a student’s learning style. If they do well working in groups with more peer input, having many classmates may be best suited to them. If they do better in a calmer environment with more personal attention from the teacher, a small number of classmates may be the right choice.

As the school year comes to a close and the end-of-school events fill every waking hour, it can be easy to forget what lies ahead. While the children are getting more and more excited to have three months with no obligations, the parents see the inherent danger in the situation: the kids will be joyous for the first two hours of their newfound freedom and lamenting about their boredom for the rest of the time. Rest assured, this parental dread of summer is not uncommon or unrectifiable. It is a simple matter of planning things for your children to do. To the parents who want to avoid three months of television watching for their children, fear not; here are a few programs to help keep your child engaged over the summer.

Reading is more than a valuable skill for academic and career success; it can be a door to an adventure, exposure to a new culture, or a temporary escape to another realm. At Sanford School, we encourage students to read for meaning, but also to read for joy. Here are some favorite books to read and reasons to read from Sanford's administration, faculty and staff:

"I love reading because it allows me to travel through time and across borders even when I’m in the waiting room at the dentist or curled up cozily on my couch. I love the way reading can challenge me to think about what I believe and why I believe it." For me, Edwidge Danticat offers the marriage of these two experiences in her Haitian novels, particularly my favorite, The Farming of Bones, -Brianna Smale, English Teacher, and Department Chair.

"If it is fiction, then I can taste what it might be like to travel to different places and times. If it is non-fiction, then I am able to bring meaningful input into conversations with my friends about various topics. My favorite authors are Rick Riordan and Tamora Pierce."  A favorite book is The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. -Danielle Wolanski, Upper School Latin Teacher.

As with many families, the decision to send our children to a private school required a lot of thought.  We both attended public schools, so had no experience with the world of private schools.  And, yes, the financial commitment was a challenge. But we firmly believe that the decision to send our sons to Sanford School played an important role in their success in college, their careers, and their overall happiness.

Among the many benefits of an independent school such as Sanford, the small class sizes, emphasis on individual attention, and excellence of the teachers stand out. 

We offer two stories that illustrate why we believe this:

What if you had to choose whether your child would learn to understand algebra or be a kind person, but not both? Fortunately, we don’t have to make those kinds of decisions because good schools teach both academic skills and interpersonal skills. Most parents have an understanding of the academic concepts taught at schools and can find more specifics in a curriculum guide or a set of grade-level standards. But, where do you look to find out what schools are doing to help kids grow up to be kind and responsible adults? How do you get a sense of how kids treat each other at a particular school?