In keeping with the theme of
the beginning of a new semester and communications, I want to spend some time
talking about different ways of using email to keep in touch with parents.
A parent email list is an
excellent way to communicate with parents and keep them up to date with what is
happening in your class. A weekly email
can inform parents of homework assignments, projects, and upcoming test and
quiz days. Keeping parents up to date
with this information is one of the best and easiest ways to open lines of
communication to parents and the information can be used by parents to make
sure their child is completing all of his/her work.
There are two methods that I
can think of to create an email list.
The first is creating a list within your email program. If you want to create an email list but don’t
know how, contact me and we can set up a time to create one. The advantages of using this method are the
ability to send messages to your list as easily as you send any other email and
once parents are added to your email list they are in your contacts so you can
easily send messages to individual parents as well.
The second method is to create
a newsletter for your class.
The website
www.mailchimp.com is a free newsletter
website.
Setting up a Mail Chimp
newsletter is more time consuming on the front end but it gives you the ability
to create a much more polished looking product to send to parents.
The newsletter can include pictures, a school
banner, a calendar, and multiple sections that can showcase different
information.
For those of you who are
creative, you can find different content that you could add to a newsletter, in
contrast to the mundane information I would normally include (as seen on the
example below).
It also gives you the
ability to create a template that you can use each week.
Because the template is saved you just need
to update the information within the template so you can save the time of
crafting a brand new email each week.
You can also use Mail Chimp to send emails to individual parents but the
process for doing so is not as easy as it is when you are using your email program. Below is an example of the newsletter that I sent to parents on the Friday before winter break. I has all of the information for what we will do the week after break, what students can be doing during break, and some information about the upcoming final for my class.
Parent Update for the week of 1/6/14
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Review Activities
In order to
help students prepare for the final exam, I created a series of review
activities. These activities require students to look back at
their notes and push themselves to use the information in their notes
to answer the questions. Many of the questions in these
activities are not as simple as a typical homework problem or test
question, they are designed not only to make students search for old
information but understand it so they can answer questions that are
different from what they are used to seeing. Over the holiday
break students have two activities they can work on. These
activities are not due until the Wednesday after students return from
break; however, I strongly encourage you to urge your child to work on
these over break.
North Carolina Common Exams
Students will
take the Math II common exam on either Thursday 1/16 or Friday
1/17. We will have only two days to review for this test in
class. All students should have notes for all of the lessons we
have done up to this point. This is the time when these notes
will really work to a student's advantage. Now is an excellent
time to start reviewing. If students reviewed 1 unit a night
to a point where they felt comfortable with that material or knew what
questions they needed to ask in class, by the day of the test they
could review each unit 3 times.
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Copyright © 2013
The Crossing Church, All rights reserved.
You signed up at school
Our mailing
address is:
The Crossing Church
The Crossing
Church
PO Box 5542
High Point, NC 27262
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