Sharing Information with Parents

Today our school had our annual Kindergarten Information Presentation. This is for the parents of the kinders who will be starting in September.

The parents are greeted by our principal who takes them on a tour of the school and at the end of that tour she drops them off in my classroom where myself and the other K teachers do the following presentation....

You will notice it is similar to a Back to School Night type thing you see in September. We do this one now to give the parents some tips of what to do to be ready for K. The parents love just getting to meet the teachers and get a feel for the school.

The slide below is the one we start with. These are the characteristics we are looking for in a kindergarten friend. Our school also offers a "TK" or Transitional Kindergarten program which is for students who are developmentally younger even though they may have a birthdate for the coming school year. This 2 year kindergarten program is an amazing opportunity for some who just need that extra time. So as we go over this slide it also helps some of those parents who are on the fence about TK vs. K. {All the incoming students with a June or later birthday are given a maturational assessment. We (the school) make a recommendation for K or TK and ultimately it is the choice of the family.}

 The next few slides are just a brief look at our curriculum... it is really hard to tell them all about those Common Core standards in just a few slides! 

 There are a few other slides showing the typical schedule of a kindergarten or TK class.. I left those out only because this post was getting too long! Oh... and one more sharing our school website and teaching the parents how to navigate it.

Then we move on to general information... how important attendance is. How we LOVE our parent volunteers and hope some of these parents may be interested in coming in class to help out.

And yes, you are reading correctly, Saturday Acacdemy. That is a new thing we are doing this year. We offer this about 8 times in the school year.  By coming to this day a student can "erase" one absence from their record... and the school gets the funding from the state that we lost when that child was initially absent. We do invite our perfect attendance kids {because it would be sad to leave them out} but we don't get funding if they attend.

One more thing about that slide above... our K friends get a school tote bag. It is paid for our PTA and is a dream! Some of them are a little sad to not have a backpack, but most of them love it. And as a teacher I LOVE it... no zippers or secret compartments... just a good old fashioned tote bag. I'll post pictures and share more about that another day!

The adorable fonts are from Cara Carroll. The clip art is Scrappin Doodles and the frame on the first and last slide is from the Enlightened Elephant!

Then in September we revisit some of the same information and elaborate a bit more about our expectations and our program. 

So now that today is over I'm on to one of the other ten million things on my list... seriously, isn't this time of year cray cray!!!