It seems like lots of people are getting ready to go back to school; DC doesn't start until August 24th, but I know that if I was going back this year I'd be getting ready. Instead, I'm trying to bring you helpful and relevant back to school content. (Hopefully, it's working.) This is the last post in my parent communication series. It's a mix of odds and ends, and I'm hoping it will be helpful. I tried to post this yesterday, but the littles had different ideas.
So this last post is just a mix of other quick ways I communicate with parents. The first way I want to share with you is Remind (it used to be called Remind101, so you might know it that way as well). This should link to their website with directions on how to sign-up. I used Remind every year I was in the classroom, and I LOVED it! It's so easy to use; you give your parents a code to sign up and then you can easily text reminders to every parent who signed up. You can also create groups within your Remind, so maybe you need to text just your chaperones, or just your parent volunteers. You can do that, too! Remind definitely saved me time every year, and it takes about 1 minute to set up. Definitely worth the time.
Last, but not least, I added a freebie to my TpT store today of forms that I use to send quick notes home. There are 3 stock notes included--a NUT note, a volunteer reminnder, and a number change form. You can grab this freebie here. I always taught in a uniform school, so when students came out of uniform I would say home a NUT note. NUT stands for No Uniform Today. Parents would sign it and send it back and I would keep track of them. If students accumulated a certain number of NUT notes there would generally be some other consequence, but nothing too serious. My personal opinion is that most kindergarten and first grade students aren't doing their own laundry or dressing themselves so they shouldn't have super stiff consequences for uniforms. I also included my "oops" form; I used this when I tried to reach parents and couldn't because their number changed. I think it's pretty straightforward. Lastly, I included my parent volunteer reminder. I would just fill this out and send it home with parents the night before they were set to volunteer. With all of these forms, I would copy a ton of them on brightly colored paper at the beginning of the school year (each on different colored paper so it was easy to tell them apart) and just have them available to my in file folders that I mounted on the wall or on my bulletin board. When I needed one of them, I would just pull it out and fill it out. Generally, I would staple it to their student's homework for the night so that they were likely to see it.
I hope these forms save you some time! Happy back to school!
xoxo
