Back-to-School Night

I hate back-to-school night for a few reasons:
(1) It ends so late considering I get to school shortly after 6am and do not leave until 9:30pm that day. Not only is that day exhausting, but the following day is exhausting too.
(2) 8 minutes is just not enough time to explain the course to the families that come.

But, I do love getting to meet the parents that do attend!

For my resource classes (in which I usually have very few families join me), I have another PowerPoint (similar to my Day 1 presentation) for the parents that highlights the information I want to talk about.

I also have a hand-out for them to take home because I know (from having gone to these nights for my younger brother) that they will not remember most of what I say by the time they get home and unwind.

And, as a very small token of my appreciation for them taking the time to come meet their students' teachers, I leave them with a tiny (and cheesy) gift.

The back of the card is actually useful and contains my email address and school phone extension. 

For my co-taught classes, my co-teacher typically runs the show with me as a friendly face next to him. I do pipe in when he forgets important things (like to point out our contact information on the board). For these classes, we just have a hand-out very similar to the course outline we give out on the first day. Actually, it is the same paper. We just run the copies off again.

And that's the end of the exhausting night! Thankfully Back-to-School Night is Thursday night, so there is only one school day to be exhausted before I can hopefully recuperate over my birthday weekend. :)

Fun fact: My first year, Back-to-School night was actually on my birthday! boo.

Hopefully this weekend I will get around to blogging about the beginning of our first unit... and snap some pictures of our first INB pages! I LOVE our INBs so far. I am SO glad I did not decide to ditch them this year even though we are 1-1 with Chromebooks. My students benefit from hand-written notes and modeling (not me policing their youtube/facebook/twitter/tumblr usage while pretending to do work!).