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As teachers, we recognise that meaningful home-school communication is essential for establishing school practices and instilling positive life values that will guide our learners throughout their lives. Environmental awareness is an area of particular significance when it comes to cultivating life values, and as educators we share the responsibility of educating all of our learners to respect the environment and adopt environmentally-friendly habits for life. This article explores how to successfully introduce the concepts of sustainability and recycling into your teaching and school values.
More about parental involvement
Coming from diverse cultural backgrounds, multilingual families may not necessarily share the same perspective or level of environmental awareness. However, as environmentally-friendly initiatives require collective effort, inclusion of all families in school-based environmental practices becomes an absolute priority if we wish for these initiatives to be successful.
Let's see how inclusion and EAL family engagement can be promoted and implemented creatively:
By using inclusive approaches and creating multiple opportunities for family engagement, schools can successfully promote recycling and sustainability practices to EAL parents and ensure their participation in environmental initiatives and long-term impact for future generations. Make sure to check out the resource accompanying this article for a great child-parent sustainability activity idea, including preparation and a step-by-step guide, by clicking on the button at the top and bottom of this page.
Our EAL learners are by no means a homogeneous group of learners and their needs in our classroom will vary to a considerable extent. As teachers may find it challenging at times to successfully cater to different EAL needs in class, developing a deeper understanding of those needs can help us address them more effectively through a number of tips and strategies.
Home is the first learning environment for children and particularly for children who learn through EAL, home can be a powerful learning environment filled with opportunities for language development. Multilingual families often wonder how they can help their children improve English at home or maintain their home language(s) and the answer to this is: use resources that you already have around you.
Parents are important stakeholders in their children’s education; they are often agents of educational change as they join a school community with social needs that tend to mirror general social trends, which should not be overlooked by school staff (Enever & Moon, 2009).