Meeting the Parents

Yesterday and today we had the opportunity to attend meetings held for parents at two of the centres (the same two where we did the trees and flowers). These meetings are held twice a year, once for each semester. At the first meeting, the local ministry chief attended and made a speech. Apparently this is highly unusual, and he only came because he was informed that we would be there! The parents were given information about every aspect of the running of the centres, from budgeting systems to school lunches to teacher professional development to curriculum to such mundane but important issues as remembering to pick up your child at the end of the day and sending a change of clothes to school for those occasional unfortunate "accidents"!

We spoke briefly about the project and how we are working with the teachers. We also gave an overview of the main areas of Early Childhood Development and talked about the important role played by parents and families. The teachers have told us that one of the reasons they place so much emphasis on teaching children to write the letters of the alphabet is because it is expected by the parents. We took the opportunity to explain to the parents the importance at this age of the development of spoken language, and in particular the development of the home language for children who are not Thai. We shared some ideas of games that parents could play at home to support their children's spoken language development. At the second meeting in particular there was a significant proportion of migrant parents present, and my coordinator's tri-lingual skills came into their own, as he was able to translate key points into Burmese as well as Thai.

We had also prepared a questionnaire to gather some data on parents' ideas about what is important in early childhood development, and on the advantages and challenges of Thai and migrant children learning together at school. It will be very interesting to see what transpires from those. I am hoping that they will give us an indication of possible areas to work on together with parents and the community during the next school year.