5 Tips on How to be Active Latino Parents in Your Child's School Despite Busy Schedule

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Becoming involved in your children's education, starting with child care, can create a positive impact on your child's academic progress. In reality, this may be a bit hard because of your busy schedule.

With simple tips from Latina and Parenting, we designed a simple guideline that can help you get involved with your child's school activities despite your busy schedule:

1. Volunteer Your Talents - Do you have certain skills that you think can help the teacher? Like you, teachers also do multi-tasking, however, some of the tasks are quite time-consuming. Ask the teacher if you can help out with simple tasks for the classroom like cutting, folding or stapling papers, making copies or even checking assignments. You may also volunteer to send e-reminders for events, meetings, field trips, parties of fundraising activities. Helping out in simple tasks like this will certainly count.

If you think you can do more, you may also volunteer to plant a class or school garden. Show the kids how to plant easy to grow fruits and vegetables. Once they've grown, you may offer cooking classes for them.

2. Become a Room Mom - If you think that you can now do more, you may want to spearhead some activities. This will give you the chance to work with the teacher in creating fun and memorable activities for the kids. Or you may want to keep the classroom connected by establishing Twitter or Facebook page for your child's classroom. This will be a good venue for parents to easily communicate. Let the page be a good source of school-approved news or updates, schedule of activities and discussion forums about academic issues. This will also help in coordinating school activities. There are free volunteer scheduling apps and tool that parents can use.

3. Attend Monthly PTA/PTO Meeting - This may not be at the top of your "to-do list," however you would be glad later on to learn more about your child's education. Share your opinion and ideas the next time parents meet. This is one of the simplest things you can do for your child.

4. Organize Your Neighbourhood - If you live in a community with many school-aged children, it's a good idea to gather together and discuss issues affecting your kids and school. You may brainstorm for ideas and present them to the school admin afterwards. This will also be a great opportunity to organize car pools, walking school buses or neighbourhood homework groups.

5. Become a Classroom Advisor - Similar to becoming a room mom, you will assist class officers in fundraising projects, planning special events and classroom trips. If you have more time, you may also want to volunteer an hour or two to tutor or mentor struggling students in your child's class.

You may also learn time management tips from the video below: