Hey, Teacher! ๐ฉโ๐ซ
Welcome to my Back to School Series, an exclusive series designed to help you navigate back to school without losing your mind (or the rest of your summer).
In this email, you will find tips and tricks to help you set up your Meet the Teacher night so that you aren't stuck sifting through 1,453,561 papers or sorting through endless supplies after everyone leaves. ๐
First Tip! Set up your room so that the directions for putting everything away falls into the hands of the students and the parents that come with them. You should not have to go through all of those things before school starts. Let your students put their things in their desks and place community supplies where they will be housed all year long. This way, you don't get stuck doing it later AND students know where things are within their classroom!
I use this checklist and place a copy at each students' desk so that they can check things off as they go. Of course, I am there the whole time to help and answer questions -- but it really does run so smoothly having this checklist in front of them. You can make a copy of this template by clicking the button below.
I have a whole pack of Back to School Night templates that coordinate with this one that includes this checklist, a welcome letter, contact info card, sign-in sheet, parent volunteer form, parent survey, and a TON more for Meet the Teacher night. You can check it out by clicking this button:
Second Tip! If you are trying to reduce your carbon footprint and don't want to print all of those papers x25, I HIGHLY recommend creating a Google Site to host DIGITAL FORM VERSIONS of your Parent Surveys, Transportation Forms, Medical Forms, Parent Information Forms and any other form you have previously used. Seriously. No one wants to go through all of those papers -- and not to mention - where in the world do you store them?! Creating a Google Site was one of the EASIEST things I implemented when I came back to the classroom 3 years ago. It is probably one of the most user-friendly platforms for ANYTHING having to do with school. If you know how to send an email, you can figure this out, I promise.
My team and I did this last year and it was AMAZING. I still do print the checklist out for each desk, but pretty much everything else is hosted on this Back to School Google Sit. We also created a Parent Portal to host all of the endless links that come with being a parent of a child in grade school (sports sign up links, Facebook group links, school calendar, school supply list, event calendars, etc.). โญ๏ธโญ๏ธโญ๏ธโญ๏ธโญ๏ธ We got amazing feedback from parents on it and plan to continue it indefinitely!
If this looks like a great idea to you, but you're intimidated at the thought of "creating your own website" (for real, it's not that deep) -- I created a toolkit that will have you creating a Site in less than an hour. My kit comes with 3 different tutorial videos, a plethora of grade level headers like the one below and a TON of buttons to make your site stand out and look professional.
Last Tip! Start now. Do not want until August 1 to start printing stuff out or getting your site set up. Things are going to go wrong. Plan for it by starting early so that you can work all the kinks out before you're asked to sit in a million meetings you don't need to sit in. ๐ Do a little bit every day or every other day starting now and that way you can still be enjoying your๐นMai Tai in your bestie's pool come the first week of August while everyone else is standing behind the printer tapping their last season Prada shoes at the copy machine man who's trying to unclog the construction paper that Susan used to copy her addition flash cards for her granddaughter during the busiest week of the year. ๐ก๐คฃ (Totally hypothetical!)
I hope this first set of tips was helpful! Later this week, I am going to share some ideas on how you can make your Meet the Teacher Night super special for your STUDENTS. Because, after all, they are the superstars of our show! I will have some very cheap and even free ideas for student gifts and fun little goodies you can have ready for your kids come that special night in August. ๐
Thank you for being here!
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