Home And School Connections To Inspire Children S Semantic Scholar

Leo Migdal

-Dec 9, 2025, 6:06 PM

home and school connections to inspire children s semantic scholar

Edited by: Li Yan, Shanghai Normal University, China Reviewed by: Xi Chen, East China Normal University, China; Jingjing Zhu, Shanghai Normal University, China; Katharina Kluczniok, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany *Correspondence: Shaomei Li, shaomei@snnu.edu.cn †These authors have contributed equally to this work and share first authorship This article was submitted to Educational Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology When schools engage with families to work collaboratively in supporting their child's education, students show higher academic achievement, improved social skills, and increased motivation to learn.

In this blog, we will discuss how strong parent-educator partnerships can expand the opportunities for students to practice and master new skills, be they academic, social emotional, or executive function. Learn about the benefits of engaged families for schools. Plus, download a resource to ensure that families feel welcomed to set the stage for engagement. The connection between home and school is vital to a child’s academic and emotional success. When educators and families work together, children receive support from both sides of their learning environment. Building this relationship requires ongoing communication, understanding, and collaboration.

Supporting student learning outside of the classroom is crucial, and there are many ways parents and educators can collaborate to keep students engaged. Simple, consistent strategies paired with activities or resources can help both schools and parents share the responsibilities for home-school connection building. The following strategies include a tip for schools, a tip for parents and caregivers, and suggestions to put the strategy into practice. Providing at-home learning resources to families is one of the most effective parent engagement strategies. Equipping families with just-right resources empowers parents to reinforce what their kids are learning at school. Schools should offer resources to help parents support their child’s learning at home, specifically the learning goals and required skills for the child’s school year, as well as resources and ways to support them...

As a parent, you are the major provider of your child's education from birth through adolescence. You guide the development of her character and mental health and help form the foundation from which she'll develop lifelong attitudes and interests. And because your home is the primary environment in which your child's potential and personality will take shape, it's important to make sure that you create a positive, open atmosphere that will not only... It is through your love and encouragement that your kids will become motivated — first to please you, and then to please themselves. This leads to self-confidence, curiosity, the enjoyment of mastering new tasks, and other healthy attitudes, all of which contribute to successful learning. But unless you are home-schooling, you will not be the one teaching your child science or geography.

And while it's true that all of the facts, skills, and concepts your children learn at school are influenced by what you do at home, your child's education is equally impacted by the relationships... Building an effective relationship with the teacher is a critical task, and, like you, every teacher wants to achieve this goal. As with any relationship, mutual respect, the ability to listen, and lots of communication form the foundation. When parents and teachers work well together, everyone benefits. Parents and teachers can provide each other with unique insight and different perspectives about the same child, culminating in a more complete understanding of that child, her abilities, strengths, and challenges. The teacher will know much more about the curriculum and the school culture, while you know more about your child's personality, tendencies, and family life.

A successful parent-teacher partnership also shows a child that an entire team of adults is on her side. Why What You Do at Home Is So Important at School A positive relationship with your child is more important to her school career than your constant presence in the classroom. Because young children identify strongly with you, your attitudes, values, and innermost feelings are contagious. They become embedded in your child's mind at the deepest levels. A strong school-to-home connection is one of the most powerful tools for student success. When families and educators work in partnership, students thrive academically, emotionally, and socially.

“Family engagement” is a phrase that appears frequently in school mission statements, district policies, and back-to-school night presentations. But too often, it ends there. For many families, the connection between home and school feels one-sided, inconsistent, or even nonexistent. At BrightSpot Labs, we work with families who want to be informed, involved, and empowered in their children’s education—and who are too often left feeling like outsiders. This post outlines five practical, high-impact strategies that show what strong school-to-home connections really look like, why they matter, and what steps educators and schools can take to rebuild trust and transparency. It’s grounded in real experiences and informed by Washington State’s CEL 5D teacher evaluation framework, which prioritizes purposeful teaching, assessment for learning, and professional collaboration.

When communication between educators and families is consistent, purposeful, and two-way, it leads to higher student achievement, stronger classroom behavior, and increased family satisfaction. Conversely, when that communication is irregular, unclear, or absent, students suffer—and so do teachers and schools. Family engagement is not about inundating parents with newsletters or sporadic updates. It’s about forming partnerships that center students, where everyone has a role and a voice. When schools commit to clear expectations around communication, both trust and student outcomes improve. Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature, based at Ai2.

npj Science of Learning volume 6, Article number: 35 (2021) Cite this article Education is central to the acquisition of knowledge, such as when children learn new concepts. It is unknown, however, whether educational differences impact not only what concepts children learn, but how those concepts come to be represented in semantic memory—a system that supports higher cognitive functions, such as creative... Here we leverage computational network science tools to study hidden knowledge structures of 67 Swiss schoolchildren from two distinct educational backgrounds—Montessori and traditional, matched on socioeconomic factors and nonverbal intelligence—to examine how educational experience... We find that children experiencing Montessori education show a more flexible semantic network structure (high connectivity/short paths between concepts, less modularity) alongside higher scores on creative thinking tests. The findings indicate that education impacts how children represent concepts in semantic memory and suggest that different educational experiences can affect higher cognitive functions, including creative thinking.

Early experience is of paramount importance for later cognitive and emotional outcomes1. In this period of high brain plasticity2,3, children’s knowledge is acquired efficiently through statistical learning4,5 and it is significantly shaped by interactions with the environment6. Despite the importance of experience on semantic knowledge (i.e.,7), few researches have focused on the role of school education in influencing not only how children acquire new knowledge, but also how they come to... The organization of semantic memory plays a key role in higher cognitive functions, such as creative thinking8. In the present research, we apply network science methods to investigate how different educational approaches, namely traditional and Montessori approaches, shape 5–12-year-old children’s internal knowledge representation in semantic memory (i.e., concept learning) and their... Montessori and traditional education can both be of high quality, but their approaches differ with respect to concept learning—an important feature of cognitive development supporting the acquisition of new vocabulary and crystallized knowledge.

Montessori education focuses on self-directed and uninterrupted learning activities that children perform within multi-age classes9,10. Children in these classes routinely engage in interdisciplinary, discovery-based work to learn new concepts (e.g., draw the outline of the continents, write their names, and classify them according to their population size), such as... According to the Swiss educational plan, traditional education focuses on teacher-directed learning activities, introducing successively different topics (e.g., language, writing, geography, math) that children perform within single-age classes. Children in these classes are asked to learn and memorize concepts (i.e., rote learning), knowledge on which they are regularly tested and evaluated with grades (starting from 6 years of age). When comparing Montessori and traditional educational approaches, Montessori classes have been shown to promote improved academic outcomes, socio-emotional learning, and divergent and/or convergent creativity11,12,13,14,15. Such effects raise questions about how educational experiences shape children’s fundamental cognitive processes, such as concept learning.

Environmental interaction plays an essential role in how children first learn about words and concepts7. For example, parents’ socioeconomic level is tightly related to preschoolers’ vocabulary level16, primarily until around the age of six17. As the child develops, the experience within the environment assumes an important part in the continuation of concept learning18. Indeed, semantic memory shows a 1.6 fold increase across elementary school years, with ~3200 root words being acquired between the second and the fifth grades19. During this period, the child learns not only the root word and its meaning, but how these words relate to other words, establishing deep knowledge representation20. During this crucial period of 6 to 12 years, the child encodes on average 800–900 new concepts a year, representing the building blocks of knowledge that form an interconnected structure in semantic memory21.

Individual differences in semantic representation are known to impact many important cognitive abilities (e.g., creative thinking) by influencing how knowledge is retrieved from memory22. Literacy as a cognitive skill (defined as word reading and language comprehension) has become a primary focus in education today and the development of these skills begins long before students ever step into the... These skills begin to develop in a social and cultural environment beginning from birth and starting within a child’s family and continue to be reinforced in the home setting. Whether reading a book or a recipe, searching for something online, or speaking in a home language, children begin developing literacy practices that include both cognitive skills and social relationships at home with their... Home-to-school literacy practices benefit both families and educators starting in early childhood. Here are some key strategies for creating and reinforcing these important connections:

Establishing strong family engagement and home-to-school connections begins with a deep belief that all families have rich social and cultural literacy practices. Research on funds of knowledge demonstrates that educators who tap into the cultural and historical knowledge and competencies of households improve relationships with families and enhance their literacy curriculum. One highly effective method for educators to understand the funds of knowledge of families in their class community is through home visits. These visits should be asset-oriented and focused on the myriads of ways that educators can learn from and with families about different home literacy practices. If home visits are not feasible, educators can also get to know families through virtual home visits, surveys, or by inviting families to visit the class. Then, educators should reflect on their new understandings and integrate them into their upcoming units and lessons.

Reading Is Fundamental (RIF) offers a Funds of Knowledge survey free for educator use here: https://www.RIF.org/literacy-central/material/funds-knowledge-survey

Home And School Connections To Inspire Children S Semantic Scholar

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