More Than Bake Sales: The Resource Guide for Family Involvement in Education

We all know how crucial family involvement at home and in school is to a child's academic success, yet how do we achieve it? In More Than Bake Sales; James Vopat details proven ways of increasing parent involvement as well as providing the resource materials you will need to get started. With illustrative examples from a variety of elementary and middle schools, the opportunities for family-school collaboration include: over two dozen curriculum-based parent workshops in writing, reading, family and community history, ecology, education standards, and computer technology; a tested model for developing parent-teacher leadership in which leadership is accomplished by doing, not talking about doing; practical and proven strategies any teacher can use to strengthen the home-school connection (how about starting your own Roving Parent Journal?);community-building activities that establish trust and improve communication with parents; accessible resource materials, including research articles, read-alouds, a list of helpful national organizations, and reproducible workshop formats. More Than Bake Sales will help you increase parent involvement in your classroom and school in ways that support children's learning and academic success.

James Vopat has been fortunate to travel widely in order to learn first hand about other cultures, English language learning, and teaching around the world. An advocate for naive art, he organizes major exhibitions of children's writing, drawing, and sculpture. He lives in Three Oaks, Michigan, where he writes, draws, and work for social justice. He is passionate in his beliefs that all teachers are teachers of writing, and all students writers.