This Blog entry is going to be nice and short...in fact, at first I wasn't even sure if this was even worth blogging about...but I just have to share my most EXCITING moment this week:

      96% attendance on Meet the Teacher Day! 

Seriously...I went home and did a happy dance!  As many of you know I have been on a quest to improve communication with my students' parents.  Last year I started my class website mrszvi.weebly.com and invited parents to start emailing me, and I think those were great moves, but it didn't really improve my communication with parents as much as I had hoped it would.

So, this year I turned to the telephone! 

During the first week of school, I called every family, introduced myself, and personally invited them to the Meet the Teacher night!  And it worked! They came!

Lesson learned.  How does one get almost perfect attendance?  Call. Call every single family and they will come!  

Last year I started a class website with hopes that parents/guardians would get a better idea of what their children were learning & doing at school. 

It included:

-a schedule of upcoming dates
-links to school district pdfs
-a form with which they could send me messages
-a class blog about upcoming units/projects
-list of daily homework and assignments
-links to educational websites
and more!

I asked parents to complete a survey monkey in which many confessed that they did not really use the website...but all said that they were happy that it existed! 

Well, this year I am hoping to get more of our parents/guardians using our site!  So taking advice from my PLN on twitter this is what I am going to do:

-post this poster outside of my classroom so that parents can easily scan the QR codes to our website and twitter account
-call each parent during the first week of school to personally invite them to Meet the Teacher night so that I can share our website URL and its functions with all of them
-collect parent emails and send messages when important updates are made

Any other advice?  I really want to get more parents/guardians involved this year!
What are you going to do to improve your school/home communication?

Well the summer is over.  It just flew by…because I was having so much fun….learning! 

I grew a lot as a teacher this summer.  From stepping out of my comfort zone to teach 6 year olds in summer school for the first time, to doing a lot of professional reading, to taking another graduate course at SFU.  I spent a lot of time on twitter, learning alongside my fellow connected educators and even “attended” my first webinar.  I presented at a couple of Pro-D events and sat one-on-one with interested teachers sharing my love for blogging and twitter.

I read and I explored and I learned.

It was amazing and it has really made me super excited for this school year!

I know I am going to continue to grow as a teacher this year.  I am travelling with the same group of lovely students into a grade I haven’t taught in a while (6/7), I am team teaching for the first time with a fantastic colleague (@hughtheteacher) and I am committed to offering my students personalized, inquiry/project/passion based learning that is both fun and meaningful to them.  It is going to be an amazing journey…I can feel it!

I am so ready and cannot wait for tomorrow!