While some things have changed since then, the activities in this post are still great skill-builders for young children!Īs schools close due to COVID-19 concerns and new guidelines on social distancing take effect, many parents are home with their young children-and looking for new ways to keep them occupied while building on the skills they’ve been learning in the classroom. To draw parents’ attention to the truly new content – the announcement of an upcoming field trip, your enthusiastic report on students’ science projects – that content needs to stand out.Ĭreate a focal point in your newsletter for the most important, freshest story, and push the repeat information to less-prominent spots on the page.*We originally published this post near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. ![]() The newsletter is not always interesting enough for me to read it for its own sake. But that’s the thing – I go to the newsletter when I need this information. This information is important, and as a parent, I go straight to the newsletter if my son loses his spelling list or we don’t know if my daughter should wear sneakers the next day. Then there’s other content that changes only slightly each week: spelling lists, specials schedule, math topics. After a few newsletters, I don’t even see this stuff anymore it’s just a lot of visual noise. Some newsletters include the school mission statement, the class motto, the daily schedule, and a blurb about the class website in every issue. If you want more parents to read your newsletter, format it in columns. The other meaning of “long” is more literal: Magazine designers know that long lines of type are harder to read, and they try to limit themselves to 9 to 12 words per line. Breaking paragraphs into bullet points also helps. When you want a message to stand out, cut down on the chit-chat as much as possible. ![]() If you want parents to send kids to school with warmer coats, they might miss that request if it’s buried in a five-sentence paragraph about how cold it is. So if your newsletter is comprised mostly of long paragraphs, parents are less likely to read through the whole thing.Ī paragraph can be “long” in one of two ways: The first is that it simply contains too many words, too many sentences all pushed together. If you suspect parents aren’t really reading what you send home, see if your newsletter suffers from one of these five flaws. My own disorganization can take some of the blame, but I’m sure my reading would be more consistent if the newsletters were designed differently. I put the newsletter into a pile of important papers, and other papers pile on top of it, and far too often, I just don’t get to it. I know how important it is to keep track of school activities, to know what my kids are learning, and to support their teachers.īut I don’t always do it. And every time I get one, I fully intend to read it. Why No One Reads Your Classroom NewsletterĪs the parent of three elementary students, I get a lot of classroom newsletters.
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