Families are the first and most important teachers for any child. Strong family engagement is central in helping children get off to a great start academically, beginning in kindergarten and continuing all the way to high school graduation. Knowing how to academically support your child at home is a key ingredient for their educational success. Resources are available to help parents and families in providing that support to their child’s learning and gain a better understanding of the school and its overall performance.
Infinite Campus: Parents and students can access Infinite Campus via the Campus Parent & Student Portal to stay up to date on grades, assignments, attendance, schedules, announcements and more. The Campus Portal is accessible from a computer or mobile device.
The Family Guides: Resources are available for families and educators of children birth to age five. Topics include the growth and development of infants, toddlers and preschoolers, along with understanding and working with children with disabilities; social/emotional growth; parenting skills; school readiness; multiculturalism and diversity; and brain development. The Family Guides are a companion to the Kentucky Early Childhood Standards, which serve as a framework to assist early care, intervention, education professionals, administrators and others in understanding what children can know and do from birth through four years of age. The Family Guides align directly to the standards and the best practices of Kentucky Educational Television’s (KET) Let’s Learn Kentucky.
Kentucky Educational Television: Helping Your Little Ones Achieve Big Things: KET offers a variety of resources, including family workshops, hands-on children’s activities and on-air programming. There are resources for parents and community connections opportunities. KET programming schedule is also provided that enables parents to find programming times for their particular area of interest.
Legislative Updates: To stay abreast of legislative news, the Kentucky Department of Education staff identifies education-related bills for awareness on an annual basis. The non-regulatory guidance posted on the site is intended to inform school districts and other stakeholders about recently enacted legislation highlighting important legislative changes. While this does not create any new legal obligations or privileges for school districts, it is solely intended to assist school districts as they implement the legal requirements set forth in the legislation and to create awareness on new legislation for all stakeholders.
Open House is a one-stop shop allowing easy access to all manners of data useful to parents, students, districts and schools across Kentucky. In the spirit of transparency, Kentucky promotes the awareness and use of easily-accessible data through the Kentucky School Report Card Suite. The School Report Card Suite Dashboards highlights key topic areas and performance indicators at the school, district and state levels and are updated each fall. The School Report Card Datasets provide historical data to assist with analysis of school-, district- and state-level data. Other educational information of interest and a glossary is available to aid in the understanding of terms utilized in this resource.
Read At Home Family Plan provides families with information on the five components of reading that are essential to becoming a proficient reader. These interconnected components are phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Beginning on page 5 of the guide, each component is explained in easy-to-understand language. Family activities are presented for general overall tips to enhance reading skill at home along with activities to do before, during and after reading together to aid reading skill development.
Standards Family Guides and Resources: Standards Family Guides help families familiarize themselves with Kentucky’s Academic Standards (KAS) at each grade level, kindergarten through grade twelve. Each guide contains a standards overview for reading and writing, mathematics, science and social studies and are available in English and Spanish.
The Family Guide to Student Assessment provides families with an explanation of the different types of assessments and how each can support student learning to meet academic goals. The resource includes questions that parents can ask their student and their student’s teachers on how to support learning at home. Questions that parents can ask their student and their student’s teachers to support learning at home are included within the resources, as well.
Marsha VanHook
Office of Continuous Improvement and Support
Division of School and Program Improvement
300 Sower Blvd., 5th Floor
Frankfort, KY 40601
(502) 564-2116
marsha.vanhook@education.ky.gov