6 Ways to Use Parent Volunteers in Your Classroom
I teach in an area that has an abundance of parent support. It’s really amazing. If we need something for our classrooms, parents are eager to get it. If we need help, it’s as simple as asking. It’s a HUGE blessing to teach with so many supportive, hands-on parents.
The one draw is that the expectation from the top is often that we must utilize parents in our classrooms, as often as we can. This can sometimes feel like one more thing that must be planned or managed, on top of an already very-full teaching plate.
If you find yourself with parents asking how they can help, and you’re not sure how to answer, today’s article is for you! Check out these six ways to use parent volunteers in your classroom this year!
1. Seasonal Decorating
This is one of my favorite ways to bring parents in to help! Give them the seasonal or monthly decorating tasks that you can’t find the time for. This may be swapping out your bulletin board decor, your door decor, or changing out the work that you have hanging in the hallway or around the room.
This is a simple enough job to give directions for, and it’s a good job to have more than one parent sign up for at once. I have a duo of moms this year who love to dream up my door decor for a new season. I don’t provide any of the materials or any instructions. They just handle it! It takes that task off of my plate, and honestly my door has never been cuter.
2. Mystery Reader
This is a BIG favorite amongst my students. Bring in a weekly parent volunteer to read to your class…but make it a mystery! The way I do this is the parent who has signed up for that Friday emails me 4-5 “clues” about themselves. They can be clues about how many kids they have, the color of their hair, some of their favorite things to do or eat, where they were born, etc.
I read the clues, one at a time, to the class. I start with a super broad clue (i.e. I have brown hair). All kids who have a parent that fits that clue raise their hands. With each clue, any kid who the clues no longer apply to puts their hand down.
By the time I’ve read through all of the clues, there are often only 1-3 students with their hands still up. So, we’ve narrowed it down to a couple potential parents. We make our guesses about who the mystery reader may be, and then I reveal the parent when they arrive at our classroom door!
The kids genuinely look forward to this every week. And the parents enjoy it too! I use this time to grade our weekly spelling test, enter grades, etc.
3. Deep Clean the Classroom
I haven’t done this in recent years, because our district really stepped up the custodian game on the weekends post-Covid, AND I do end of day jobs every day.
But, I’ve heard of several teachers still using parents this way, and I’ve done it in years past. On Fridays, during your recess time, have a small group of parents (or maybe just one at a time) come in and deep clean your room! They can wipe down counters/sinks/door handles. They can sharpen pencils, They can scrub desks. They can dust furniture. Whatever is most helpful to you and makes your classroom feel like a healthier place to be!
If your recess or planning block is close to the end of the day, it will STAY clean all weekend long, making your Monday extra happy.
4. Fluency Station Leader
This can work for math fact fluency or reading fluency. I have an entire blog post about my math fact fluency parent volunteer kit! Every Tuesday for 25 minutes, I have a parent push into my room and work on fact fluency. I’ve done this in a number of different ways over the years, but my new favorite is to put together a fluency kit and have the parents play fluency and number sense games with the kids! I use these games.
For reading, I have used parents in the past to come and read fluency passages with the kids. You can have them just read to get extra support with an adult, or you can have parents time the kids and record the words correct per minute. It gives you an extra data point every week that you don’t have to collect, but doesn’t require a ton of teaching expertise on the parents’ part.
I have fluency passages that you can grab here, if you need some!
5. Running Copies/Prepping Materials
This is one of the BEST ways to use parent volunteers if you don’t already have help with copies or prep at school.
Nowadays, I’m blessed with an entire staff of general education TAs at my school. They run lunch duty in the cafeteria. They cover recess duty so we can get extra planning once a week. The rest of the day, they run copies, laminate items, cut task cards, etc. for teachers. It’s truly amazing.
But I haven’t always had this. Once upon a time, I worked in a building with no gen ed TAs. I had to prep my own lesson materials and run copies on my own time. I spent my first year of teaching staying too late or coming in too early to get things done.
My second year, a mom came to me and said, “I can come to school every Tuesday morning for one hour to run copies and prep things for you. Would that be helpful?”
Ummm. Yes ma’am, it would.
So, that’s what she did for an entire school year. The trick I had was to make sure that I had things ready to go by Tuesday, but I often had a good idea of what I at least needed made for the rest of that week, if not the next week. It was so, so helpful.
So, if this would helpful for you, and parents are asking how they can help…I highly recommend taking prep off of your plate!
6. Help with Big Projects
Every once in a while, we have big projects on our plates that feel a little overwhelming. Bring parents in to help manage materials, organize kids, and get things knocked out! Or, better yet, send the project home with parents to do and bring back. Here are some examples:
-Christmas ornaments, end of the year fun projects (tie dye shirts, painting, etc.), mother’s day/father’s day crafts, etc. are all great to have a team of parents come in and help you get everything done in stations. Does it spoil the surprise a little if you have some moms in there helping with mother’s day presents? Yes. But if you don’t let their kid go to their station, you can still maintain some mystery. It always works out. :)
-If you make a special gift for the kids, like an end-of-year memory book or video, pass it off to the parents! This would have never occurred to me until I saw my son’s kindergarten teacher do it. She was planning to give a kindergarten memory book to each kid in the class, but she had the parents make them.
Essentially, she took all of the pictures throughout the year. She printed the pictures and put them into envelopes for each kid. She planned the theme of each page (first day of school page, field trip pages, science experiment page, etc.) and gave the parents the binders, construction paper, and pictures for each kid. A team of moms glued those pictures to the pages, put stickers on them, and slid them into page protectors in each binder. They made an entire class set of memory books! And the teacher didn’t put in any of the time. Genius.