How to Get Your Community Involved in Your Classroom (Video)

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Video Transcript of How to Get Your Community Involved in Your Classroom

Hey guys! It’s Rae. We’re going to be focusing today on how to involve your community in your classroom. In my classroom, my students participate in mock internships that are all sponsored by local businesses. Now this is a great way to involve your community because in my classroom the community is literally immersed into everything we learn.

However, a lot of people ask me: Where do you start?

Because you can’t start by teaching that way and having 25 themed units, right, that’s a ton to take on. So what are small ways that you can involve your community? I have a few tips to tell you today, but I want you to try and challenge yourself to take on one, see if it works, and then let me know what elements you’re still figuring out. Because I problem solve with teachers all the time on how to make this dream a reality.

So first and foremost, I always like to consider teachers to find some way, to find someone in the community to sponsor an element in your classroom. This can be a bulletin board, this can be a lesson, this can be a very small unit or a very big unit, it can be maybe a classroom transformation day – any way that you can involve the community in some way in your classroom is not only free marketing for that business, but it’s also a great way for the students to connect the content your teaching to then the real world application.

An example of this is that in my classroom, it rains, and they walk into the classroom and I tell them that my roof is leaking and we put on our hoods and we grab umbrellas and sneak into our room and there’s raindrops hanging from the ceiling and we turn the AC really chilly so it really feels like it’s raining in there with all of the noises that we put in with thunder. Then the students practice descriptive detail. So with this, that small day of doing this fun descriptive detail activity is sponsored by a plumbing and roofing company. They come in and they joke with me about how they can’t fix my roof and they’re not involved in any way besides just selling my story. They love it. And they love being involved in student learning in a way that doesn’t ask them for money, and doesn’t ask them to really do anything besides do what they do everyday and talk about their career. Super fun.

Next thing I want to suggest is reaching out to your community or having your students reach out to your community. So one suggestion for that is my students do a Tobin’s Pizza unit which is a local pizza company. At the end of the unit, my students make placemats where they have a little section where they fill in something about themselves, just in the center, and then there’s four boxes and in those boxes they teach the reader, the person with the placemat, how to do something involved with math. So for us it’s adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing decimals. Now all they do is they’re solving a problem in each of those four boxes. But these placemats either get to go home with the students and now they’re talking about math over dinner.

Hello! That’s always good.

Or actually, our restaurant in town for a night, like a family night. Whereas the families get to sit down, they get one of the Evans Junior High placemats, one of your school placemats. So cool. So now not only are we getting our students to talk about math over dinner, but now we’re teaching our community skills that they may not use day to day, or maybe have forgotten the connection, but there are great connections on how this content is in our world.

So a great one that I saw a teach do recently is they took the same idea of the placemat and learned how to calculate a tip. Now this is something that students know in terms of the math content it’s really easy for them to understand as long as they understand place value, but this is something that adults forget. And so we all take out our phones to calculate the tip, when really we can do it in our heads by using math.

I hope you’re able to take one of these ideas and run with it. There are so many ways to involve your community and I can tell you that with all the connections that I make with my community, I find that most people want to be involved, but don’t know how or they think that they have to have money to be involved in the school system. And we don’t. We need people with time, we need people with money, and we also need people who are willing to help spread the love of learning. Have a wonderful rest of your day, hope to keep connecting, let me know if you need anything.