Parent Communication

I can hardly wait until the season finale of the Bachelorette tomorrow night!! Will it be Jef or Arie?! I'd give the rose to Jef! Kristin at A Teeny Tiny Teacher always posts the most hilarious reviews on her series Talk About it Tuesday following every episode of the Bachelorette and the Bachelor.

So since it's not time for the Bachelorette yet I'm going to share about parent communication. During student teaching I attended a workshop on parent and school relationships where the presenter recommended a great resource - Beyond the Bake Sale, a book on establishing and maintaining a partnership between families and schools. When Borders (I MISS BORDERS!! but am now a regular Amazon customer and by regular I mean a wwwaaayyyyy too frequent customer) was having their going-out-of-business sale last fall I spotted Beyond the Bake Sale and figured it would come in handy later so I bought it.

I have read parts of the book here and there...the authors have an amazing vision of what they think a family and school partnership can look like. Research shows that families + community + schools = high student achievement. They give many suggestions and ways by which to create this partnership. The biggest theme I've gathered from the parts I've read is to keep parents informed.

The following pictures are of the documents I created for my Parent Communication binder. I took photos of the documents with my iPad, used the app Penultimate to write notes about how to use the documents, and took screenshots to show you!

One way I'm going to keep parents informed is to contact them regularly with positive news. I've created a positive note record (below) so I can balance the communication I initiate between all the students.

 In each students' section I created a communication log (inspired by the Clutter-Free Classroom) to cover my bases for any issues that may arise.

I also created a conference record that I will use to show our collaboration on a student's social and academic progress. I love using the terms "glows" and "grows".

Click the document below to access all the files from my Parent Communication binder in Google Docs. Hope you can use them or find inspiration from them!

How do you keep parents informed? How do you (or your school) establish and maintain a partnership between families and teachers/schools?