Hint-After saying hello and welcoming them mention how pleased the students are to be able to share aspects of their school work and classroom. Also say thank you on behalf of the other students for taking the time to come and also thanks for all the support they give you at home. Then finish with saying you hope they enjoy the day. Parents Day is a gesture of honor given children by to their parents to show their love and respect for them. It is a perfect gift of recognizing the educational and proclamation efforts that parents put in the upbringing of their children.
Parents Day is considered very special society as it acknowledges the dedication and unconditional love and support that parents give to their children despite of any problem they face in life to accomplish it. The support of parents is considered to be very important in the growth and development of the children in both emotional and academic front. The day provides an excellent medium to maintain good communication between two generations and helps in building the emotional and mental bond stronger. The entire family comes together to celebrate this event with great enthusiasm and gusto.
For parents, the day is the acknowledgment of their successful transformation from man and woman to husband and wife, and thus to a stronger connection of being a parent together. It shows that the efforts they have put in the upbringing of their children are right and are in the right direction. Thinking & Wisdom It is difficult to learn. It is even more difficult to apply one’s learning to a given task, and yet that is what our school community aims for: providing students with the knowledge, skills and confidence so that they can indeed make good changes in the world.
The teachers at Riverdale Country School have all talked about basic skills and ensuring that students leave with the type of cultural capital that they need to move on to the next steps in their education; however, the teachers here really want to focus on having students develop as critical and creative thinkers. We put a real emphasis on thinking and that is not easy to teach. Good thinking is achieved by working as an apprentice to an experienced mentor, in learning to ask good questions and to propose effective arguments alongside a skilled practitioner.
I hope that you will actively support this quest to have your sons and daughters become good thinkers by coaching them through the process. This means supporting them, as mentioned in the article to which I sent you the link on Carol Dweck’s work in my August letter. She asks us all, teachers and parents, to focus on the effort that young people put into a challenging task rather than praising their intelligence or innate abilities. This will help them be better learners. As they develop as critical thinkers at the school, I hope they will also engage in wonderful debate at the communal dinner table with you in the evening.
This takes the work of the classroom and makes it tangible for young people by making learning authentic. We must all take the time to engage in informal dialogue with our children about issues that are of importance to them so that they can start to make concrete connections between their lives and the academic disciplines they are studying. This is a point made by research into the brain and cognition, to retain knowledge it has to be actively connected to prior knowledge and experience.
I hope to see us use such research into cognition and learning to inform robustly our classroom practices—I believe that this is a professional obligation for educators. I know that your children will develop as thinkers as they move through the school, but I would like us to push even further. I would like us to think about developing wise children. I know that sounds like an oxymoron to some degree since adolescents are not usually wise and perhaps should not be wise all the time.
Nonetheless, I would like to have our students develop as wise learners in the classroom, becoming self-disciplined and being able to evaluate their own learning, but also show such wisdom on the athletic fields as they interact with other teams and in their own lives as they think twice about the life decisions they face. To my mind, wisdom is not something you suddenly achieve in your dotage, but rather has to start being developed from an early age as Robert Sternberg, the noted psychologist has observed. Therefore, let us all think of ways to have our young people become wiser, and thus, more successful leaders, citizens and human beings.
