Supporting Student Success: Academic Guidance for Parents, Families, Caretakers, and Communities (Preschool - Second Grade)

Supporting student learning is a shared effort between caregivers and educators. Many things can influence how students develop, learn, and perform in school. A strong support system can make a meaningful difference in their success. This guide provides ideas and questions to help strengthen the connection between home and school, helping students receive the support they need to thrive. To get the most from this resource, think about how the suggestions fit into your daily routines and conversations. These prompts can spark meaningful discussions with your child and their teachers.

 About This Guide and the Colorado Academic Standards

This guide was developed by academic content specialists at the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) with input from CDE’s Office of Family, Community, and School Partnerships, CDE’s Office of Migrant Education Program, and other family and student advocacy groups.

The Colorado Academic Standards and Essential Skills provide educators with a road map to help students find success in college, careers, and life. The essential  skills, as outlined in Colorado law, include creativity, problem solving, social and cultural awareness, civic engagement, character and leadership, and the use of technology to gather, evaluate, and communicate information. The best place to learn about what your child is learning is from your child’s teacher and school. The standards are written for professional educators and your child’s teacher can help you understand what the standards mean for your student. In Colorado, teachers and schools make decisions about the materials, methods, and courses used to help your student reach the goals described by the standards.

If you want to learn more about Colorado’s standards and access other guides, contact the academic content specialists in CDE’s Office of Standards and Instructional Support.

Arts

The visual and performing arts standards reflect the knowledge and creativity required to produce a work of art. Students are expected to study art in different forms, such as dance, theatre, music, and visual arts, and participate in each by creating, performing, and presenting art while responding to the art of others and making connections between works of art and the world around them.

Ways You Can Help Your Student at Home 

Preschool and early elementary students are surrounded by art in the videos they watch, the music they hear, and the play they experience with friends and family. Helping your student grow as an artist can be as simple as helping them see art in their everyday world and encouraging them to sing along, draw pictures, and act out stories. Here are some suggestions for helping your student create, enjoy, and perform art:

• Watch, perform, and create dances to explore movement and expression.
• Talk about what dance might mean.
• Use imagination to create diverse characters in plays, encouraging the use of voices, facial expressions, gestures, and body movements to express thoughts and feelings.
• Support art making at home with simple supplies.
• Use creativity to change everyday materials into other objects.
• Sing songs, move to songs, and play instruments when listening to or singing songs.
• Create music or sound effects to stories or poems.
• Clap to the beat, talk about slow and fast, loud and quiet, and different instruments in music.
• Talk about where you hear music every day and how it makes you feel.
• Identify imagery and art in daily surroundings.
• Know that art can be used to represent people, places, things, and ideas.
• Create works of art based on personal relevance.

Tips for Successful Communication

You can help your student succeed by communicating openly with them and their teachers. Here are some suggestions.

Humanities

The standards in the humanities promote effective communication and understanding diverse perspectives. The content areas of reading, writing, and communicating, social studies, and world languages are essential in a well-rounded education that develops skills like using language, problem solving, civic engagement, and cultural awareness.

Ways You Can Help Your Student at Home 

Preschool and early elementary students are curious about their world. They tell stories about what and who they know, and they use their imagination to invent new stories. You can help your student learn and share more about the world by exposing them to new places, people, cultures, and ideas, either by exploring yourselves or by reading about the explorations of others. Here are some suggestions for helping your student engage in the humanities:

• Use pictures to learn the meanings of words.
• Share stories and photos about your student’s life, as well as stories and photos about when you were a child.
• Read together every day. Consider both fiction and nonfiction from your local library.
• Take a walk in your community and take note of the geographic features, both natural and human made.
• Encourage writing. Practice writing letters, sounding out words, and using words in sentences.
• Read magazines and newspapers with your child and show pictures or photographs in the news.
• Encourage questions and suggest thinking about where the answer might be found.
• Discuss stories, poems, recipes, movies, or anything else your student enjoys.
• Check out books from the library in unfamiliar languages and learn to pronounce and read them.
• Listen to audio books of familiar stories in another language.

Tips for Successful Communication

You can help your student succeed by communicating openly with them and their teachers. Here are some suggestions.

STEM

The Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) standards help give students tools to describe, measure, and understand the world around them, then organize and analyze that information to make predictions and solve problems. Students are expected to combine and apply their STEM knowledge in computer science, mathematics, and science to think critically about overcoming challenges in our world.

Ways You Can Help Your Student at Home

Preschool and early elementary students are young scientists in the making, always observing and asking questions about how things work. Students this age are beginning to label, categorize, measure, and sort things. You can help them become a stronger STEM student by helping them ask good questions and collect and make sense of information. Here are some suggestions for helping your student engage in STEM:

• Play games using dice, cards, or puzzles to practice counting, patterns, and problem-solving.
• Encourage kids to look around, notice things, and ask questions. 
• Model simple ways to start talking about what they see, like “I see...” or “I notice...”.
• Talk out loud about what you’re doing when you cook or measure things.
• Ask what information they would need to solve a problem.
• Count things they see, like feet under a table or houses on the street.
• Guess how many of something there are, like crackers in a jar or toys in a box.
• “Debug” a morning routine. Look at your family’s morning routine and work with your student to fix any problems you find.
• Teach the steps to make a sandwich, also known as sequencing.
• Help group things by how they look or feel, like tall vs. short or heavy vs. light.
• Explore career opportunities and where students might see themselves using these skills.
• Provide time to ask questions and let them think about things they don’t know the answers to yet.

Tips for Successful Communication

You can help your student succeed by communicating openly with them and their teachers. Here are some suggestions.

Wellness

The wellness standards focus on developing individual skills to enhance physical, emotional, social, and financial wellness. Students investigate healthy eating and living habits, positive communication strategies, effective decision-making, personal and community safety, and saving, investing, and debt to achieve financial well-being.

Ways You Can Help Your Student at Home

Preschool and early elementary students are learning how to care for themselves, including some basic health skills related to their hygiene, diet, physical fitness, and safety. They are also learning what money is and how it works, both in the real world and in games with play money. You can help your student make good decisions by talking to them about healthy choices. Here are some suggestions for helping your student learn to manage their wellness:

• Talk about what health means to you.
• Talk about ways to be safe at home and in your neighborhood.
• Practice how to ask for help and what to do in an emergency.
• Practice brushing teeth and washing hands and talk about why it is important
• Take a trip to the store, explore, and discuss a variety of different foods.
• Discuss how you talk to and have a good relationship with others.
• Encourage play with transactions (for example, ordering and paying for food).
• Allow for the observation of financial activities like grocery shopping, paying bills, going to the bank, and explaining what you are doing.
• Explore different ways to move and take part in various physical activities.
• Balance items like beanbags, books, or other objects on your head while moving in any way you can or make up a game using the objects.

Tips for Successful Communication

You can help your student succeed by communicating openly with them and their teachers. Here are some suggestions.