Fantastic Fridays

Hi, friends

I hope everyone is having a great week!  My mom is visiting while the hubs is on a business trip, and the weather finally broke here in DC and today was beautiful!  We saddled up the pup and the boys and walked all over the Hill today.  The weather was way too lovely to be inside working today.

I'm coming back at you today with the second part of my series on parent communication.  I think that we can all agree parents are a hugely important part of the classroom, even though they're likely only there for specific events.  Having parents on your team can make a huge difference in your school year.  Previously, I blogged about the parent forms and parent communication binder I use each year.  You can find that post here.  Today, I'm going to share a tip with you that I call Fantastic Fridays, but really you can use it any day of the week--Marvelous Mondays, Terrific Tuesdays, Wonderful Wednesdays...you get the point.

The way this works is that during Morning Meeting I would pick 3-5 student sticks from my jar (read:  old Crystal Light container that I had fancied up and repurposed as a fancy jar).  These student sticks went right into my clipboard, but they could really go anywhere that students can't see.  Their names would remain a secret all day long.  If your name was on a stick, your parent got called at the end of the day.  I called it Fantastic Fridays because the idea was for it to be a positive phone call (although there were definitely a few times where it wasn't so).  The greatest kickback of Fantastic Fridays is that students don't know whose name was selected, so everyone works harder so that if their name is on the stick there is definitely something fantastic to say to their parents.  Examples of things that I've noted on Fantastic Fridays are:  high quality work, intelligent answers/contributions to class discussions, showing respect to a friend, being a friend, taking care of our classroom, solving a problem, or helping a friend solve a problem, and standing up to a bully.  These certainly aren't the only things that you can note to parents on Fantastic Fridays; just some food for thought.

I hope you're able to use Fantastic Fridays this year to share some positive communication with parents!
xoxo