Sabrina De Los Santos and Audrey Martinez-Gudapakkam presenting at the NAEYC Conference
On Nov. 6-9th at the annual NAEYC (National Association for the Education of Young Children) conference, Sabrina De Los Santos and Audrey Martinez-Gudapakkam will be presenting together with Daisy Cuevas and Amarilys Patrone, two paraeducators from the Sarah Greenwood k-8 school in Boston. The presentation will be done in Spanish, titled “Empoderar a las familias latinas para ayudar a los niños con las matemáticas” and it will showcase two projects which focus on engaging Latinx families with preschool- aged children in mathematics.
The first project explored the use of social media to share videos with the families, modeling how parents and children can engage in mathematics through daily activities. The second project builds on this work through a math professional development program for paraeducators in which they create and share videos with their students’ families through social media. The videos they develop feature themselves and a child engaged in math activities that can be easily done at home.
Paraeducators are valuable resources for connecting with families since they often come from the same communities as their students. This enables them to help teachers include strategies and examples in math classes that reflect their students’ lives and cultures.