Family Engagement

There is a substantial research base that concludes play-based learning, in combination with responsive interactions, is the best way to build academic and executive functioning skills in young children. But many programs have yet to embrace play-based learning as a family engagement approach, opting instead for more traditional homework exercises like worksheets. Traditional homework is often developmentally inappropriate for preschoolers, frustrating for parents, and unappealing to children.

In this series of online trainings, you’ll learn about research-driven ways to partner with families in supporting children’s development using resources that are freely available to early learning programs and families.

Learn about research-driven ways to partner with families in supporting children’s development.

Our family engagement resources are designed to fit into your existing programs and activities that engage families. Get started exploring this toolkit by downloading these resources here for teachers and administrators.

Parents are their child’s first and most important teacher. However, some parents are uncertain or lack confidence in their role as their child’s primary teacher. Hosting planned, playful, and purposeful family events are an excellent way to prepare parents to be successful home educators and engage as partners in their child’s educational support team. This type of active family engagement has been shown to positively impact student achievement levels and educational aspirations.

Supporting Sprouts Family Workshop Materials provides bilingual resources and activities that help families support young children's social-emotional, language, behavior, and early literacy development.

This workshop will focus on giving parents concrete tools to build a positive, warm relationship that will help support their child to be more cooperative, independent, and trusting.

This workshop will focus on helping parents support their child’s language development by teaching new words in ways children can understand.

This workshop encourages families to test possible design solutions to a variety of problems and encourages tinkering with objects to come up with creative solutions to problems.

This workshop considers ways that young scientists and engineers can plan investigations and make predictions about what will happen during those explorations.

This workshop will encourage parents to help their child develop new language, pay attention better, and learn more by asking questions many different questions and by responding warmly to expand on their child’s interest in the book, while reading together.

This workshop will help families understand that “data” is everywhere and gathered each time they count, group, or compare.

This workshop will encourage families to develop easy models of patterns and systems within the natural world.

This workshop will focus on strategies parents can use to make learning letters and words fun and engaging for their child.

This workshop encourages families to use counting, tables, graphs, and other forms of data collection to make meaning from their investigations.

This workshop will focus on giving parents concrete skills to keep conversations going in a way that supports and enhances their child’s early literacy and language skills.

This workshop will explore ways that young scientists and engineers ask questions that can be answered through exploration or other investigations.

This workshop will encourage parents to use a variety of playful strategies to help their child develop writing skills and highlight the importance of those strategies.