Parental Engagement Ideas
Jo Kiddell avatar
Written by Jo Kiddell
Updated over a week ago

Here at Doodle we know how important parental engagement is. We have a host of resources available to support this as well as collating our top tips in one place!

  • Here is a link to our parent webinars. There are currently five on-demand parent webinars available for viewing. Topics covered vary per webinar.

  • There are also 'reminder' letters which can be accessed on the Teacher Dashboard>Resources>Launch Resources>Launch Letters. You could send them to every family to help as part of a push/revamp (or new letters for new families to Doodle).

  • We make it super simple for parents to link their parent email address so that they can monitor and support their child's Doodle journey. This article and video within our well stocked Help Centre guides parents on how to do this.

  • The DoodleConnect app is FREE for parents to download and, once linked, parents can use this for quick daily checks to see if their child has Doodled that day.

  • Lots of schools set out an expectation that Doodle was used at home 3 times a week, for 5 minute sessions. It could be worth having a simplified 'slogan' like this which pushes for that 'little and often' (partly for staff/parents/students to realise it doesn't HAVE to be 30 minute sessions, either). Repeating this at meetings with parents throughout the year, during 1:1 parent meetings, in newsletters, etc can be really helpful as a way of reinforcing it.

  • We've heard great success of parental engagement when schools run 'Stay and Learn' sessions after school - this is where learners teach parents how to use Doodle!

  • Our annual Spring and Summer challenges are a fantastic way to encourage parental engagement. Most excitingly, all those who take part will earn a FREE in-app badge, a real-life pin badge and an exclusive certificate to celebrate their hard work! These are great to promote in school and get parents engaged during the holiday period.

  • Doodle works! We know this from our own experiences of using Doodle within school settings and also from schools currently using Doodle. For hard evidence, we had a PhD student complete a study which correlates the amount of stars a learner earns to the amount of progress they make. The study was based on thousands and thousands of learners and the results were really clear:

  1. Earning 7 stars a day resulted in an average increase of 1.1 DoodleAge a year

  2. Earning 20 stars a day resulted in an average increase of 2.2 DoodleAge a year

  3. The more stars a child earns in DoodleMaths a day, the faster they progress

You could share this chart from the above study with parents/learners to show that the more they Doodle, the more progress they tend to make!

We hope there's some ideas there for you to try to increase your parent engagement. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any more questions, or would like to let us know how you get on!

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