As a result of the success of the Help Your Child to Succeed Parents’ Guide –
and in response to requests from teachers, Family Learning workers and a variety of local authority staff – we have developed this Toolkit of training materials. The Help Your Child to Succeed Toolkit provides learning professionals with everything required to run a programme for parents on helping children to learn and succeed.

The TOOLKIT includes the following:

• Facilitator’s Handbook
• Help Your Child to Succeed Parents' Guide (separate page)
• Parenting Cards
• Family Game Cards
• World Map Poster
• CD-ROM

Facilitator’s Handbook (96 pages)

The Facilitator’s Handbook describes a programme of ten course sessions, each exploring ideas from a chapter of the best-selling Help Your Child to Succeed Parents’ Guide.

The resources are designed for maximum flexibility, so you can tailor the programme to best fit your parent group. You can, of course, run a programme offering all ten sessions in full, or you might feel that your potential parent audience would be more comfortable with a much shorter course, or with slimmed-down sessions. There’s no need to carry out all sessions, or do them in sequential order! For ease of planning, each session follows the same, colour-coded format:

Core activities – RED Desirable, but not essential, activities – ORANGE Optional extension activities – YELLOW

The sessions are carefully designed to engage, support and motivate adults from every background, with any learning preference. All activities are practical and interactive, encouraging reflection, discussion and sharing of experience, and involve parents in little or no reading and writing.

Facilitator’s Handbook Example pages: 13 - 15 - 32 - 33 - 34 - 35 - 70
(You will need Acrobat Reader to view the pages)

Parenting Cards and Family Game Cards

Parenting Cards - 4 sets of 12 sturdy, A5-sized cards show various common styles of parenting. The appealing illustrations are supported by brief descriptions outlining the ‘ pros’ and ‘cons’ of each approach. These cards are used to support various activities throughout the programme.

Family Game Cards - 4 sets of 32 sturdy, A6-sized cards support the Family Game and other activities. Players work out what is going on in various family scenarios, and come up with positive suggestions as to how an adult could help a child get the best out of each situation. The cards are designed to prompt discussion, so parents are encouraged to think as openly as possible.

Map Poster A1-sized World Map poster supports the ‘Cupboard Journey’ activity, looking at the origins of groceries we use in our daily lives. Parents can be encouraged to try this activity with their children at home, using a smaller version of the map printed from the CD-ROM.

CD-ROM
The CD-ROM provides copies of all the resource sheets in the Facilitator’s Handbook together with all the activity cards.

All resource sheets All activity cards Publicity posters Stationery labels – to attach to any Learning Diary notebooks or folders you choose to supply to parents

Help Your Child to Succeed

The beauty of the Help Your Child to Succeed Toolkit is that it has far greater potential than the obvious one of running parent sessions. You could use the resource to communicate with parents in an entirely different way, for example:

• a parents’ evening session on ‘How to help your child learn’
• a Saturday School for parents
• a series of twilight sessions
• a parents’ book club
• notes sent home via a school newsletter
• an open course hosted by a school or community centre
• part of the core content for childcare classes
• a dads’, step-dads’ and granddads’ Help Your Child to Succeed workshop
• notes on a school website
• breakfast club.