The Parents as Teachers Program
I believe that the whole concept of the Parents as Teachers (PAT) program is really useful and applicable. Every person can have some troubles because of lack of knowledge; the same concerns the problem of being conscientious parents. I liked the website and think that the information is great: All people are encouraged to take part in the PAT program because it enables inexperienced parents to gain experience and learn what can be more appropriate for their children and apply some practices that have already appeared to be useful in their cases.
The thing I liked most about the PAT website is that parents of children that have some problems with their health or learning share their experience and encourage others to take part in this program. I can conclude that parents that take active part in the PAT program are sure to be good parents and will never be at a loss if their child faces some problems; though the program does not provide people with universal solutions, they try to find individual approach in every case.
The Educator Working in the Parents as Teachers Program
I interviewed a teacher from the Jefferson County Schools district in Tennessee who worked in the PAT program for two years and now gave up this activity. She told me about the experience of doing home visits as a part of home-based literacy program. She had pleasant and exciting experience as well as negative one. The children she worked with were about three to five years old. The successful experience included a visit to a family where all parents were going to join the PAT program.
So, they were waiting for her and wanted to learn more about the peculiarities of the program. That visit enabled her to conduct a lesson in a friendly environment and show those parents the benefits of being a PAT program member and possible ways to help others. In this respect, she visited them during two next years as this visit at the very beginning of her PAT membership. Though both parents became members of PAT as well, she was doing biweekly home visits and they could do that together.
The negative experience (actually, there was more than one such experience) included parents that met her willingly and went away as if they were not interested in the progress of their children. Those parents did nothing to help their children develop their skills besides home-based literacy program. She had no more than 200 visits per year. The activity she found really exciting for children was the one where they could complete stories after she had introduced a beginning of the story. Children are great inventors and I think that this tasked helped to break the ice and find out the skills of a child.