Involving the Community in the Classroom

Reflective Teaching 30 Day Blog Challenge

Day 23: Write about one way that you "meaningfully" involve the community in the learning in your classroom. If you don't do so yet, describe one way you could get started.

This is something that I don't do in the classroom yet. So far I have been concentrating on getting to know the children in my classroom, school and their parents. I haven't branched out much into the wider community.

Also our first few weeks focused on Myself and at the moment our learning focus is centred on the theme of 'Around the World with the Gingerbread Man', so we are thinking bigger than our community at the moment and branching out to other countries and cultures. However we have children from the Philippines and children with ancestry from India and Germany so there is a possibility that we could use their parents to teach us about those cultures in the classroom and perhaps there are other members of the community that might be able to come in and share their culture with the children as well.

Next term we could do find a way to bring in a member of the community that fits in with our learning so that we can use our community knowledge in a meaningful way. Maybe also we just need an open community day where we can invite the wider community to interact with the students and share their work with them.