Back to School Night Organiztion

Hello,

For the last few years I have been blessed with an amazing teaching partner. One of the things that we both have in common is a nervousness when speaking to parents. This makes back to school night very stressful so we have always gone a little overboard in organizing our thoughts for the parents. We started with a PowerPoint presentation that has morphed its way into a very detailed packet that we send home with parents. This allows us to talk as little or as much as we feel comfortable with and still give the parents the information that they need.

We go first grade all the way and align our thoughts with the ABC’s. Using the ABC’s allows us to cover a wide range of material: attendance, curriculum, field trips, volunteers, etc. and have it look really organized at the same time. We do add 2 S's to the alphabet because we really wanted to break Social Studies, Science, and Spelling information apart. We love this format and our parents seem to appreciate all the information that they get to take home and keep on hand. After the ABC’s section we have a page for special notes, a page for our classroom schedules, and a page for the grading scale. The letter for the grading scale was one of several additions to the packet this year. We were able to change our first graders to an OSN grading scale versus an ABC grading scale. I have included images below of our packet below so you can get an idea of what I am talking about.

An advantage to having a packet to hand to parents is they have all the important information in writing. They aren’t just relying on our nervous words during a presentation. This is helpful especially when you add things like not responding to emails on weekends or after a certain in the evening so that you can be with family. Major things like that are in writing so that they aren’t questioning whether they heard you right or because they forget half of what you tell them by the time they drive home because their life can be just as crazy as ours.

Thanks for reading about how my partner and I organize our thoughts for back to school night!