You are here: Home Teaching Resources Build a Partnership with Parents Teaching Tip of the Week Tip #2: The First Day Letter
The following list contains ingredients you may want to include in your First Day Letter.
• Biographical information about yourself
• Your educational philosophy
• Your personal and class goals for the year
• Major curricular emphases
• Classroom management system
• Highlights of the year
• How you will communicate with parents and how they can reach you
• A blank page at the end of the letter for parents to use to inform you about any special concerns, abilities, or interests that either they or their children have.
Though I refer to it as the First Day Letter, it’s a good idea to wait a few days before sending it home. On the first day of school, parents are so inundated with paperwork from the school office that a letter from you may get lost in the shuffle. I send a very brief note home the first day of school, maybe one paragraph long, introducing myself and alerting parents to watch out for a more detailed letter that I will be sending home in a few days.
I have uploaded The First Day Letter that I send home into the “Classroom Resources†section of the website. I used the concept of “quality education†to structure my thoughts. By organizing the letter around this central theme, I was able to present my beliefs, ideas, and expectations in a coherent, integrated fashion. With quality education as my umbrella topic, I was able to connect essential ideas such as character, teamwork, and communication. Without a broad theme, First Day Letters can too easily become long laundry lists of topics, unconnected to one another or to any larger idea.
Â
New Teaching Tips appear every Sunday of the school year.