On track and Not on Track...keeping it all in perspective...

Our quarter ended last Friday and report cards go home tomorrow.  We recently began sending home additional data sheets with our report cards that detail each child's progress on a variety of assessments we give to our kiddos three times a year, think Dibels and a wide variety of math computation tests.  Which is great because it keeps our parents informed.  However, all the reports show is their child's score and then in big capital letters the words ON TRACK or NOT ON TRACK.  No mention of growth from the assessment period before or any mention of the benchmark that determines whether their child is considered on track or not.

My kids reading scores in the fall were pretty low.  That's what sparked the creation of my fry phrase games and weekly fluency homework sheets.  We've been working so hard and many of us made so MUCH growth, but many of my sweet babies missed the winter benchmark score by literally a few words! The words NOT ON TRACK literally made my heart sink. 

The same was true with our computational fluency.  For my sweet babies who answered 20-30% of the multiplication and division timed assessment correctly in the fall and then who grew to 85% accuracy this winter, it felt so wrong to see NOT ON TRACK next to their name. They ARE on track to meet the benchmark sometime this year, just not right now. 

Once I started comparing their fall and winter data I felt so much better.  The amount of growth was amazing and SHOULD be celebrated.  Knowing that most of my kiddo's parents didn't hang onto the fall data sheet, I filled out this little form and attached it to the one going home tomorrow. 

 
I hope all my kiddos' parents are as excited to see their child's growth as I was!  As a class, we have a lot to celebrate and we are ON TRACK.  On the track to accomplish great things!

Transportation Chart on TpT and Home to School Note Freebie

Even though I teach older kiddos, I have discovered older doesn't necessarily mean I'm home free when it comes to them knowing their school to home routine.  A lot of the "I don't know where I'm going after school" issues that occur oh so often in the lower grades, happens all the time with bigger kids too.  

At my school, we are required to post transportation charts near our classroom door.  I love this, especially when I have a sub.  I teach until 4:00, and there are MANY times where I have to drop my kiddos off outside and then book it to my car right after work for appointments or meetings at another building. We aren't required to stay until the buses leave, so having these transportation charts posted in our rooms with where all our little darlings go after school has prevented mass chaos many times at my little school.  If there's an issue, one of our office staff members checks out the chart and finds out exactly where the kiddo should be and usually this solves any transportation misunderstandings.

The only thing bad about it is that our charts are ugly.  Like in Times New Roman and basic table ugly.  Plus, I usually had to copy a new each day because so many of my darlings would go home differently every single day.  So when I saw all the transportation clip charts floating around blog land and Pinterest, I knew I HAD to make one. :) Print, laminate, glue onto a ribbon, give kids a clothespin, and use it ALL YEAR long. No more making copy after copy! Plus, it's cute. :)

My printer is out of ink and I haven't made it to Office Depot yet.  Forgive me for not actually having mine assembled, but this is what mine will look like.  I'm LOVING the primary polka dots this summer. :) If you love Primary Polka Dots too...my templates are available at my TpT store. :)

 Click {here} to check it out! 

I've included templates for MOST school to home transportation options, but just in case I didn't include one that applied to your school, I included two blank Powerpoint templates for you to use.  All you need to do is type the options in and print.  I have included links to all the fonts I have used in this product as well, so you can make sure the fonts match. :)

Now time for your freebie! While most of my kiddos know exactly where to go after school, their parents aren't great at writing notes about changes in their after school transportation routines.  I don't know about you, but I really don't feel comfortable putting kiddo on the bus that usually goes to after school care just because they said "Mom said I was riding the bus today."  Most of the time, they're right, but I always think in my head, what if they're not? Once upon a time, I had a phone in my room, which was great in instances like this, kiddo called mom/dad and confirmed what they were doing.  My cell phone doesn't always work in my concrete jungle room and I'm not on an unlimited plan anyways to be using all my minutes on classroom calls, so I stress from day one...that emails and notes are the best way to contact me. At the beginning of the year, the parents of each kiddo in my class gets a copy of these fill in the blank notes. 

I LOVE these notes.  I put copies of these in my parents parent resource folder and really talk them up at open house.  Parents really do use them, and since they are fill in the blanks, they also include all the information the office needs for absence documentation, early dismissal information, and for me, changes in their daily transportation routine.  

If you would like your own copy, click {here} to download it from Google Drive. :) For some reason, it says no preview available.   Just ignore that.  Once you click download, all the notes and the cover page will be all there. :)

Today is really my last Monday off.  I'm off to conquer some Monday Made Its, so my Monday Made It post will be live tomorrow. :)

If you enjoyed the home to school notes freebies, I love to hear about it in the comments! :)

Parent Communication Freebies

I'm going to take a tangent here for a minute before I get to your freebies.  I hope ya'll don't mind. ;) Building a house is really stressful.  People warned me, "Building a house is one of the most stressful things you'll ever do." The whole process of picking the fixtures, the financial paperwork, and drafting of the contract was pretty painless.  The actual construction, tests my patience every day.  I'll drive by and see crews working on every house on our street but ours, or multiple contractors working on other houses, while only one contractor works on ours.  Then you see houses that started after you get ahead, and well you feel frustrated.   It's hands down the most stressful thing I've done other than job searching for my first teaching job six years ago, and I'm more than ready for it to be over.  Originally, we were given a projected closing date that was before my school year started.  Now, we are looking at closing after school starts.  :( Taking time off, for closing and a final walk through, is just not something I'm really looking forward to right now, even if that does mean I get the keys to my very own house at the end.

Okay, rant over, I just had to vent for a second to people other than my husband...  :) You want to know another thing that stresses me out? Parent communication. I'm talking about the parent communication outside of newsletters and conferences, you know the difficult phone calls, the small talk while they volunteer, classroom parties, etc...  Maybe it's because I'm not a parent and I can't connect with them on the parenting level, or maybe it's just my personality, I'm very much an introvert. 

Parent communication got easier as time went by at my old school, because I had a rapport with many of my parents from either having one of their other children previously and because I had been in the building for a while.  Even though now and again I had to make some really difficult phone calls and deal with some uncomfortable situations, most of the parents I dealt with were very kind and respectful, and I felt overall I had a really good relationship with the parents of the kiddos in my class. 

Moving to a new school this past year was hard, because I didn't have that rapport.  Many parents thought it was my first year of teaching ever, even though it obviously wasn't. I even had one parent this year pretty much bully me with very mean notes almost daily. Thankfully, I have a great principal who is very supportive of his teachers and who basically told her "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it all." 

Since parent communication can be a source of stress for me, I try to keep it as organized as possible.  I have a binder with tabs for all my students, numbered so I don't have to change them each year, with the forms pictured below for each of my kiddos. 

 

I run these two forms 1-2 sided on the copier and have them on my students desk at Meet the Teacher Night.   These forms are super helpful, because I know exactly how the parents want to be contacted when I need to communicate with them and I have a place to record notes of our communication, this is especially helpful for phone calls and little school chats about various issues.  If a parent sends in a note/email, I place a copy of the note/email, as well as my response, in their child's spot in my binder as well.  

I give my parents this form at Meet the Teacher, but encourage them to take it home, and really think about their answers.  I tell them to write as little, or as much as they would like, but this form really does help me get to know my students so well from the people that love them the most, their families.  I also refer to the goals they have for their child/any concerns they have for the school year during our first conference as well.  

I have upload these forms to Google Drive for you, so strange to not say Google Docs.  Just click on the pictures to download.  The parent contact information sheet and the parent survey are in one PDF, and the log is a separate PDF file. 

What tips do you have for organizing parent communication? Do you have any tips to share for dealing with difficult parents? Share in the comments below, so we can all learn from each other! :) Oh, and don't forget you can like Fourth and Ten on Facebook, my page has been feeling a little bit lonely. ;)