1. NZ Maths
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  3. Numeracy project PLD
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  6. Section 6: Other Ideas to Involve Parents

Section 6: Other Ideas to Involve Parents in Numeracy

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  • Share ideas that encourage mathematics in everyday experiences, for example, in the car, supermarket, garage, sports field, kitchen, and garden.
  • Invite parents into classrooms to share their stories about how they learnt mathematics at school. Discuss similarities and differences; consider different cultures and cross-curricular approaches.
  • Include a cultural presentation at the beginning or end of a Home–School Partnership: Numeracy community session and involve the children and/or parents.
  • Invite different cultural groups to share mathematics activities and games from their cultures.
  • Ask parents to translate the Number Framework or key messages into their home language. These could be displayed in the school.
  • Provide content workshops for parents to consolidate their own knowledge.
  • Have a mathematics open day or morning, with children playing games, demonstrating equipment, or using computers with their family.
  • Start a mathematics library of books and/or games.
  • Read picture books with a mathematics context to your students just before home time to model shared reading and mathematics to parents.
  • Have computers available for parents to use after school to support those who don't have a computer at home. Encourage exploration of the nzmaths website.
  • Use the school newsletter to provide tips on mathematics or a weekly problem or game.
  • Create a numeracy wall in your school foyer displaying items such as current numeracy activities, ways to help with numeracy at home, and numeracy problems.
  • Have a celebration at the end of the Home–School Partnership: Numeracy series of sessions – perhaps a sports afternoon or a shared meal. Invite cultural groups to prepare food; this could be combined with health, technology, or social studies emphases. Recipes could be provided. Children could collect data, for example, on numbers coming or quantities needed.
  • Survey parents at the end of the Home–School Partnership: Numeracy sessions to find out how things have gone, how they have applied the mathematics ideas, which activities they enjoyed, what they would like in future, and so on.
  • Consider repeats, for example, for new parents, or a two-year cycle.
  • Remind parents of the Families and whānau section on the nzmaths website, Team-Up booklets, and reading books that have a mathematical content.
  • Have a noticeboard in the school with photos of parents enjoying themselves at the first Home–School Partnership: Numeracy session, with space for comments if wanted. Parents coming into the school will see the photos and perhaps realise that Home–School Partnership: Numeracy may be less threatening and more fun than they thought.

 happy people.

 

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