Supporting parents

• Invite families to visit and share their language and culture. They could teach the children a song, cook food from their culture, wear traditional clothes, play a traditional instrument or tell traditional stories from their culture.
• Ask families to write greetings from their language to display at the entrance to the classroom.
• Investigate festivals and celebrations from the relevant culture and those significant to your community.

The apps are not available to be downloaded at home as they are an educational tool designed to be used in a preschool or school program.

As a teacher, you are skilled in ways to incorporate the apps into your overall program to provide the most benefit to children. You can also monitor children's usage of the apps and the learning outcomes achieved and use this information in reports to families.

Parents are often very interested in what their children are learning. If you are approached to explain the ELLA program to parents, there are a few ways you could introduce them to the apps.

The ELLA apps can’t be downloaded at home, but you could invite families to view the apps with their child at drop-off or pick-up times. You could also allow parents to explore the apps in demo mode at an information night.

It is important to introduce parents to the language you have chosen. You could try one or more of the ideas below.

• Put greeting words from the language in the apps at your entrance to your preschool or school or in your classroom to incorporate the language into your welcome routine and assist families to become familiar with words and phrases their child may be using.
• Provide information and language translations in your newsletter to help parents connect with their child through the language at home (copy and paste from support materials on the ELLA website).
• Make a display board to share and document the children’s engagement with the ELLA apps. Document their learning and understandings.
• Include photos and children’s insights into language learning and culture in portfolios, learning stories, parent/guardian interviews, documentation, newsletters and displays.
• Incorporate words around the classroom as appropriate for families (for example colour words near the painting easels).

• Make links with other preschools and schools who are also using the ELLA apps and/or learning the same language and arrange visits that provide opportunities to use the language in meaningful contexts.
• Visit local gardens, museums, art galleries and zoos, if culturally relevant to the language or to your families.