ABSTRACT
Like schools elsewhere, Redlands has witnessed the shift from parents doing only the more menial tasks like repairing and clearing up to taking on responsibility for activities like cooking and sewing, to helping with reading. We have also witnessed the demise of the myth that parents have to be highly educated before they can be considered an asset in the classroom. Of course, the closer to the core curriculum, the more controversial parent participation becomes, because it challenges the role of the teacher as expert. Yet, more and more, educational research into effective classroom practice has been pointing not to the teacher as expert, but to the teacher as facilitator with children as active partners in their own learning. There has also been a mass of evidence from Dagenham, Haringey and Coventry - to name but a few - which has proved that parental involvement in reading is very effective. Some of us began to ask ourselves - why stop at reading?
