For three hours on Tuesday evening, I had the pleasure of meeting about 36 of my new 9th-graders and their families at GW’s Freshman Orientation.
I have two advanced freshman English classes this year (1st and 6th periods) with almost 50 freshmen total on my rolls as of yesterday morning. So, including the student and mother I met on Friday, that makes about 3/4 that I’ve met already. Not bad. :)
At times C106 got pretty packed up front, with everyone trying to go over the materials list and complete the sign-in sheet. And then there was my “Parents’ Wall”:
I gave parents three sticky notes each, one for each section.
I can tell by the number of sticky notes on the board that some parents didn’t do it, and that’s okay. (I know Mr. Hawke would look at one of our kids’ teachers like she/he were crazy if they tried this on him. :P)
Overall, the experience was a very positive one. My students seemed very enthusiastic for the most part, and their parents seemed very engaged. I only wish I’d been able to talk with more of my students’ parents one-on-one.
This evening, we have our school-wide Open House. I may get to see some of my freshmen again, coming back to make sure they can navigate the hallways. And I hope to meet the other freshmen who weren’t able to come by Tuesday and my three classes of sophomores. . . AND all their parents!!
Thanks to Meredith Stewart for the great parent-participation idea. :)
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Most of my teaching resources are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, which means you can feel free to use them with attribution as long as you don’t use them commercially. If you’re not sure, don’t hesitate to ask me. Unfortunately, I am currently unable to send out my tests and quizzes, but I am hoping to establish a less time-consuming alternative for this in the near future. Sorry!!
