The Elementary Entourage: Communication

Showing posts with label Communication. Show all posts

Organizing Assessments and Evidence of Student Growth With Portfolios

Creating a strong student portfolio is an essential component of showing student growth and evidence of learning progress. The following is a collection of tips for creating a student portfolio that can be used first as a tool for parent teacher conferences, and then as a learning memory book at the end of the school year.

Setting Up Your Portfolios

Using legal-sized hanging file folders is the first step to creating an organized portfolio system. These slightly-larger file folders are perfect for filing special “Wall Worthy” projects that are often larger than 8.5”x11”. After you add name tabs to each hanging folder, organize them in alphabetical order by first or last name.

Next, add two legal-sized manila file folders to each student’s hanging file. One folder will be designated for portfolio items such as projects, writing pieces, reflections, and important assessments.

The second folder will be designated for forms such as confidential assessment data, parent surveys, student goal sheets, copies of IEP, SST, or 504 forms, and other student information sheets for teacher use.

Preparing Portfolios for Parent Teacher Conferences

In the months leading up to parent teacher conferences, begin to take notes on student goals, strengths, and areas of need. You can type these notes into a form divided into two sections: Way To Go and Ways To Grow. Organizing information in this way quickly shows parents a few things going well for their young learner (in the Way To Go category) and areas that need development (in the Ways To Grow category).

Next, collect evidence that can be woven into your conversations with parents at conferences. Providing them with visual evidence to support your commentary about their child’s progress makes these conversations more meaningful and easy to digest.

Transforming Portfolios Into Learning Memory Books

Before your parent-teacher conference ends, decide which portfolio items you will send home with parents and which items you will keep until the end of year.

Keeping all writing final drafts and art projects on hand and in chronological order is highly recommended. This allows you to easily host a learning celebration during which students can read through their best writing pieces, look back on all their artistic creations, reflect on their growth, and make plans for future learning. You are sure to feel a tingle in your teacher heart when the classroom fills with the sounds of flipping pages and tiny giggles as students look back on how far they’ve come since the first day of school.

Everything Is Ready For You

This easy-to-implement portfolio system will keep you organized for conference season and provide you with a physical culmination of student learning at the end of the school year. If you are ready to bring these ideas to life in your own classroom, visit my Teachers Pay Teachers store to grab your own Editable Student Portfolio Toolkit.

What I Wish I Knew My First Year of Teaching {with Core Inspiration}

My first year of teaching is what I like to refer to as my golden year. I had an amazing group of students, supportive and flexible parents, and a team that made me feel like I was way more proficient in my new profession than I really was. The school year was filled with fun and excitement and by the last day of school, I was completely in love with my new career. I was a rock star. I was unstoppable. I was on top of the world.

In reality, I was blinded by excitement and didn’t know what I didn’t know… soooo many things I didn’t know.

One of those many things was the world of of Google +. Also known as the best and easiest way to keep classroom parents in the loop. Here’s the scoop.

At the beginning of the year, create a private Google+ community.

Double check the community settings to ensure the privacy settings are secure so you can post class photos.

Brainstorm what you want to post in the community. Pictures with descriptions of what students did in class each day/week, classroom newsletters, parent polls, updates about upcoming classroom events, questions to spark dinner time discussion, parent volunteer reminders and needs, etc.

Invite every parent in your class to join your community.

At back to school night, show parents how to turn on alerts for your community posts. This ensures they will receive a notification each time you post an update.

Set parameters for community postings. Decide if you want to be the sole poster or if you want to give parents permission to create posts as well.

Create a schedule for when you will post to hold yourself accountable. I don’t recommend sharing this schedule with parents because life happens and you don’t want them emailing you when they don’t see your post published at 3:00 on Thursday.

At the end of the year, don’t delete the community. This serves as an awesome memory book for the families in your class.

Although Google+ wasn't thought of as a classroom tool when I first started teaching, it has certainly become one of my favorite parent communication tools. Do you have any recommendations or favorite ways to use Google+ in your classroom? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

New Procedures: Post It LOVE FREEBIE! [with Sassy, Savvy, Simple Teaching]

Happy New Year friends! I hope you had a fabulous holiday break and a great start to your New Year. For those of you who are already back at school good luck! I am a week behind you on my year around schedule! Our students return the 11th.

I am here to share with you a new procedure that I made for me as a Literacy Coach to build relationships, communication and to show some love! But, you can use this as a classroom teacher for your students.

I personally think it is very important in my position to have good relationships with the classroom teachers. This is for many reasons as I am sure you all already know.

Here are a few things I do, some better than others, to build positive relationships:

Walk to each teacher's classroom every day or every other day to say hello and see if they need anything.
Include affirmation, encouragement, thankfulness and other positive words in emails.
Take an interest in the teacher's personal life, by getting to know them and relating to them.
Be an advocate to the powers above for them.
Take their ideas, suggestions and complaints to the leadership team for feedback.
Try to provide them with any resources they ask for or at least seek out resources for them.
Find answers to their questions if I can't answer them myself.

I have a goal for 2016 to find a way that I can manage to tell teachers what awesome things they are doing. Some great suggestions from colleagues of mine are:

Email one team a week and tell them something great you noticed.
Email one teacher a week and tell them something great you noticed.
Write a note or letter to one teacher a week and tell them something great you noticed.

I really liked these personal ideas and I knew I wanted to do something personal and by hand. I did not want to write an entire letter or spend $ on note cards.

So I went with personal quick notes on Post Its. Why? My thinking behind this is that I would rather purchase post it notes if needed but I can get them at school for free. Next as we all know, anything hand written feels more personal than an email. Also most adults seem to remember what your wrote to them by hand then by email. Some teachers may throw them out immediately and some may keep them for a little bit. Either way, their eyes will read something in my handwriting that is reminding them of the awesome things they do. That is something that will go further than maybe I can expect.

You can click on any of the photos below or HERE to grab this FREEBIE!