This year a school goal of ours is to send out "group" emails to the parents of the students in our classes. We can pass on information that way. Our PLC has decided that we will send out a minimum of 4 group emails each semester. I hope to send more. It is so easy once you have your contact list made up. I'm sure there are some parents who don't want to hear what is going on, but I bet there are more that do enjoy hearing these things. I wish I received emails from my kid's teachers. I actually sent one to them this year telling them a little about each of my kids.
This year I sent one of my emails out prior to the first day of school. The email simply introduced myself and the class I had the student in. It reminded them of the schedule on the first day and the remainder of the year. In the last paragraph I gave a brief overview of the course. One of the other paragraphs I borrowed from another colleague:
"I would like to invite you to send me an email introducing yourself and/or your student to me. I would love to hear about things that interest them, their strengths and weaknesses etc. Be sure to include their name in your email."
Some of the responses I received were really neat. I learned some interesting things about both the parents and the students. I was surprised at the detail some put into their responses. Although I did not receive a lot, the ones I did receive I enjoyed reading and was sure to thank the parents for their email. This is something I will continue to do each semester. I'm hoping more parents will start to respond.
Dear Carey,
ReplyDeleteAs a proponent of math education in the United States, we need your help to promote our nationwide math competition by blogging or posting about it on your blog!
As you probably already know, despite the fact that the US spends the most money on education per capita, our students are ranked 25th globally for math proficiency. The MATHCOUNTS Foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to improving that statistic. MATHCOUNTS’ third annual “ Math Video Challenge” is a math competition for 6th to 8th graders that encourages student innovation as they create and star in their own math videos, thus exciting them to pursue higher education in math.
As the webmaster of this awesome blog, we are asking you to help support this effort by mentioning us in your next blog or forum post or promoting our logo with a link to the site. So far this contest has gathered over 500 submissions and millions of views on the videos. Our goal this year is this year is to do even better. With your help, we are confident we will reach this goal.
For more information on MATHCOUNTS or the Math Video Challenge, visit our webpages at mathcounts.org and videochallenge.mathcounts.org/math-camera-action.
Respectfully,
Jake Byrnes
Hi Carey!
ReplyDeleteLove your blog and was wondering if you are still using the standards based excel tracking sheet that you blogged about a few years ago. Would you still be willing to share the file? Also are you still using this system or did you find a system that you like better? Thank you! jbauer@nsd.org