To help you prepare for your upcoming outreach, we have put together the following information. If you follow these suggestions, based on years of experience with outreaches, your outreach will run smoothly and you will gain the most you can from our time with you. Often, families spend valuable teaching time arranging meals, answering phones, or dealing with the room schedule instead of focusing on learning as much as possible. It is our aim to help you get the most from our time with you. We hope the following is helpful!

1. Prepare lunch for your child, yourself, and me before the outreach begins, or have someone who is not involved in the outreach prepare lunch.
2. Make sure you schedule people to be with your child when I work with you and your volunteers (Q AND A SESSION)
3. Stress to your volunteers the importance of being on time for sessions in the room and training sessions during the outreach, so that no time is wasted.
4. Make sure that your child is in the room each morning by the time the outreach is scheduled to begin.
5. Prepare a meeting area.  Choose a room in your house that is quiet and comfortable, free of distractions from phone calls.
6. Set up your tape recorder in the meeting area and a video camera in your observation room the day before your outreach at the latest. Be prepared with enough blank cassette tapes and videotapes. It is best to have too many instead of not enough.
7. Have pens and paper for taking notes in the meeting area.
8. Turn on your answering machine for the duration of your outreach, with a pre-recorded message saying that you will return calls in the evening.
9. If you have other children, get a baby-sitter to be with them or send them to a nearby relative or friend’s house for the time of the outreach.
10. Find a way to relax before your outreach: I want this to be an enjoyable and fun experience for you.
11. RELAX AND ENJOY YOUR OUTREACH

I hope that this information is useful to you. If there is anything else you can think of to do ahead of time in order to prepare for your Outreach, feel free to do it. This way, you can enjoy your outreach without being distracted by other concerns or commitments.